ed most for you
always," Lamar had said, bitterly; "why have you waited so long?" "You
loved her first, John, you know." That was like a man! He remembered
that even that day, when his pain was breathless and sharp, the words
made him know that Dorr was fit to be her husband.

Dorr was his friend. The word meant much to John Lamar. He thought less
meanly of himself, when he remembered it. Charley's prisoner! An odd
chance! Better that than to have met in battle. He thrust back the
thought, the sweat oozing out on his face,--something within him
muttering, "For Liberty! I would have killed him, so help me God!"

He had brought despatches to General Lee, that he might see Charley, and
the old place, and--Ruth again; there was a gnawing hunger in his heart
to see them. Fool! what was he to them? The man's face grew slowly
pale, as that of a savage or an animal does, when the wound is deep and
inward.

The November day was dead, sunless: since morning the sky had had only
enough life in it to sweat out a few muddy drops, that froze as they
fell: the cold numbed his mouth as he breathed it. This stubbly slope
was where he and his grandfather had headed the deer: it was covered
with hundreds of dirty, yellow tents now. Around there were hills like
uncouth monsters, swathed in ice, holding up the soggy sky; shivering
pine-forests; unmeaning, dreary flats; and the Cheat, coiled about the
frozen sinews of the hills, limp and cold, like a cord tying a dead
man's jaws. Whatever outlook of joy or worship this region had borne on
its face in time gone, it turned to him to-day nothing but stagnation,
a great death. He wondered idly, looking at it, (for the old Huguenot
brain of the man was full of morbid fancies,) if it were winter alone
that had deadened color and pulse out of these full-blooded hills, or if
they could know the colder horror crossing their threshold, and forgot
to praise God as it came.

Over that farthest ridge the house had stood. The guard (he had been
taken by a band of Snake-hunters, back in the hills) had brought him
past it. It was a heap of charred rafters. "Burned in the night," they
said, "when the old Colonel was alone." They were very willing to
show him this, as it was done by his own party, the Secession
"Bush-whackers"; took him to the wood-pile to show him where his
grandfather had been murdered, (there was a red mark,) and buried, his
old hands above the ground. "Colonel said 't was a job fur us