del, days and nights culled like a
bouquet from years spent in a foreign land, old snatches
out of boyhood. These answered no longer, nor did a closing of the eyes
and a sinking downward, downward through the stratas of being into some
cavern, reckonless and quiet, of the under-man. It as little served to
front the future and try to climb, like Jack of the Beanstalk, to some
plane above and beyond war and disappointment and denying. He was
unhappy, and he spoke wearily to his horse, then shut his lips and faced
the Siberian road. Entering in his turn the fold of the hills, he soon
came up with the advance. As he passed the men on foot a sudden swirl of
snow came in larger flakes from the leaden skies. Before him were a
dozen horsemen, riding slowly. The air was now filled with the great
white flakes; the men ahead, in their caped overcoats, with their hats
drawn low, plodding on tired horses between the hills, all seen vaguely
through the snow veil, had a sudden wintry, desolate, and far-away
seeming. He said to himself that they were ghosts from fifty years back,
ghosts of the Grand Army in the grasp of General January. He made what
haste he could and came up with Stonewall Jackson, riding with Ashby and
with his staff. All checked their horses, the general a little advanced,
Stafford facing him. "From General Loring, sir."

"Good! What does he want?"

"There is much suffering among his men, sir. They have seen hard service
and they have faced it gallantly--"

"Are his men insubordinate?"

"Not at all, sir. But--"

"You are, I believe, the officer whom General Loring sent me once
before?"

"Yes, general. Many of the men are without rations. Others are almost
barefoot. The great number are unused to mountain work or to so
rigorous a climate."

The commanding general sat regarding the emissary with a curious chill
blankness. In peace, to the outward eye he was a commonplace man; in war
he changed. The authority with which he was clothed went, no doubt, for
much, but it was rather, perhaps, that a door had been opened for him.
His inner self became visible, and that imposingly. The man was there; a
firm man, indomitable, a thunderbolt of war, a close-mouthed,
far-seeing, praying and worshipping, more or less ambitious, not always
just, patriotically devoted fatalist and enthusiast, a mysterious and
commanding genius of an iron sort. When he was angered it was as though
the offender had managed to antagonize some