to spring lightly forward, and to
catch the thing beneath my toe. It invoked me to all sorts of gymnastic
efforts. The impulse racked my breast, and set up an argument against
every reason in favor of a jog-trotting march for the balance of the
daylight. I surveyed the poor lieutenant from head to foot, and pictured
to myself his surprise, should he find himself hitched to the ground. He
would turn, I thought, with open, questioning eyes, and perhaps look
flushed by the accident. He might only hop a step farther on, and trust
to my not again overreaching him. He might, impelled by the influence
that tormented me, fall behind me. I had an unwavering conviction that
that tape would never be removed,--and that, consequently, in some way,
the lieutenant, who played guide to it, would be my haunting demon all
the weary hours of my march.

Soon after I had conferred my tart speech upon the Sergeant, and had so
sealed my failure to gain his grace in behalf of my friend and myself,
the Adjutant was at my side. A hale, hearty, well-made man, unperturbed
usually, he was now almost another person than himself. I thought I knew
what causes produced the pallor on his face and the quiver about the
loose-hanging under-lip. The good fellow had had in his jacket (before
it was stolen) the leave-of-absence which was to have carried him home
to be married, and he was to have availed himself of it in a week.
Perhaps the thought of his lady gave him the woebegone expression. All
sorts of sweet dreams, that had illumined his life for months, and
filled up the wide chinks of camp monotony, were now quite bitterly
ended,--capped by the reality worse than the dream which is called
nightmare. His smiling eyes were hooded only a little sooner than were
those milder ones at home, no doubt under traced eyebrows and with far
finer lashes. The marriage, perforce, was put off. The view of home was
put off. Perhaps the Adjutant's solemn quietus, like an extinguisher of
the light of his and his sweetheart's hopes, would drop upon him in
loathsome Libby, and cancel the leave forever. This, being the weightier
thought, was evidently bearing upon his mind.

I had resolved, in a business way, upon two points,--perchance brought
to my decision through some such tender passage as the above: first,
that, as we could not escape from the lines together, he must take the
earlier, because, as in mortgages, the better risk; and second, that if
he did not answer i