ary!"

A few large and very yellow stars looked down from the blackness
above; under the wheels the rotten planking and worn girders of the
Long Bridge groaned and complained and sagged.

Ailsa, looking out from under the skeleton hood, behind her, saw
other waggons following, loaded heavily with hospital supplies and
baggage, escorted by the cavalrymen, who rode as though exhausted,
yellow trimmed shell jackets unbuttoned exposing sweat-soaked
undershirts, caps pushed back on their perspiring heads.

Letty, lying on a mattress, had fallen asleep. Ailsa, scarcely
able to breathe in the heavy heat, leaned panting against the
framework, watching the darkness.

It seemed to be a little cooler on the Virginia side after they had
passed the General Hospital, and had gone forward through the
deserted city of Alexandria. About a mile beyond a slight
freshness, scarcely a breeze, stirred Ailsa's hair. The driver
said to her, pointing at a shadowy bulk with his whip-stock:

"That's the Marshall House, where Colonel Ellsworth was killed.
God help their 'Tigers' if the Fire Zouaves ever git at 'em."

She looked at the unlighted building in silence. Farther on the
white tents of a Pennsylvania regiment loomed gray under the stars;
beyond them the sentinels were zouaves of an Indiana regiment,
wearing scarlet fezzes.

Along the road, which for a while paralleled the Orange and
Alexandria Railroad, cavalry vedettes sat their horses, carbine on
thigh. No trains passed the embankment; once she saw, on a
weed-grown siding, half a dozen locomotives apparently intact; but
no fire burned in their furnaces, no smoke curled from their huge
drumhead stacks; and on the bell frame of one an owl was sitting.

And now, between a double line of ditches, where a battalion of
engineers lay asleep in their blankets, the road entered the pine
woods.

Ailsa slept fitfully, but the far challenge and the halting of the
waggon usually awoke her in darkness feebly lit by the rays of a
candle-set lantern, swung up inquiringly by the corporal of some
guard. And, "Pass forward, Sanitary!" was the invariable formula;
and the ambulance rolled on again between a double abattis of
fallen trees, flanked on either horizon by tall, quiet pines.

Once she heard singing; a small company of cavalry-men straggled
by, and, seeing their long lances and their Belgian forage caps,
she leaned out and asked what regiment it might be. Somebody
answered: "