t up, deep, joyous and uncontrolled, its echoes pulsing out
across the hot, red fields till it reached the distant camp; and Grant
looked up from a war map's crisscross lines, grunted, and lit a fresh
cigar.

And Lieutenant-Colonel Morrison sat his horse before his cheering line
of men, silent, happy, while two tears rolled, unheeded, down his
cheek--a soldier and a man!

His tenderness to a little child had torn him from his saddle and doomed
him to disgrace and death; and then, one line from her baby lips had
mounted him again and set him before his troopers on parade.

"_It was when ... Daddy came through the woods ... and put my mamma ...
in the ground_."

Two lives she had held--in her little hands--and had saved them both
with a dozen words of simple, unfaltering truth.

* * * * *

On the dusty pike which led to Virginia's capital another rider plodded
through the heat and haze. His coat, once gray, now hung in mud-stained
tatters about his form, but beneath his battered campaign hat his thin,
pale features were smoothed by a smile of happiness.

Behind his saddle, one hand gripped tightly in a rent in the soiled gray
coat, sat still another Rebel--the smallest of them all--her tiny legs
stretched out almost straight on the horse's wide, fat back.

"Daddy--how far is it to Richmon' now?"

The rider turned his head and pointed north.

"It's close now, honey. See that line of hills? That's Richmond. A mile
or two and we'll be at home."

Again they plodded on, past fields of shriveled corn whose stalks stood
silently in parched and wilted lines--lines that were like the ranks of
the doomed Confederacy--its stalks erect, yet sapped of the juice of
life. Where orchards once had flourished their rotted branches now hid
mouths of rifle pits, and low, red clay entrenchments stretched across
the fields.

"Daddy," broke out a piping voice, "don't you think we'd better make
this Yankee horse get up a little? 'Cause--'cause somethin' _else_ might
happen before we get there."

"It's all right, Virgie," her father answered, with a pat on her small,
brown knee. "These lines are ours, and I reckon we are safe at last."

They were. Two Rebels on a Yankee horse soon made their triumphant entry
into Richmond. They passed through Rockets, by the half-deserted wharves
on the river bank where a crippled gunboat lay, then clattered over the
cobble stones up Main Street till they reached th