irs and the
door was thrown open. Dudley, escaped from arrest, ran out with a
flaming pine torch in his hand.

"Halt!" cried Morrison, with raging anger. "Dudley! HALT!"

But Dudley knew that there would be little use in halting and so ran on
until a big revolver barked behind him and he pitched heavily forward on
his face. Morrison looked down on the prostrate form and his lips moved
sadly, pityingly:

"And I promised her--protection!"

CHAPTER IV

Of all the memories of war, after the dear dead are buried, there is one
that serves to bring the struggle back in all the intensity of its
horrors--to stand both as a monument to those who bled and suffered and
as a lonely sentinel mourning for the peace and plenty of the past--a
blackened chimney.

Of all the houses, cabins, barns and cribs which had made up the home of
the Carys a few short months ago nothing remained to-day but ashes and
black ruin. Only one building had been left unburned and this, before
the war, had been the cabin of an overseer. It had but two rooms, and a
shallow attic, which was gained by means of an iron ladder reaching to a
closely fitting scuttle in the ceiling. The larger room was furnished
meagerly with a rough deal table, several common chairs, and a
double-doored cupboard against the wall. In the deep, wide fire-place
glowed a heap of raked-up embers, on which, suspended from an iron
crane, a kettle simmered, sadly, as if in grief for her long-lost
brother pots and pans. The plaster on the walls had broken away in
patches, especially above the door, where the sunlight streamed through
the gaping wound from a cannon shot. The door and window shutters were
of heavy oak, swinging inward and fastening with bars; yet now they were
open, and through them could be seen a dreary stretch of river bottom,
withering beneath the rays of a July sun.

Beyond a distant fringe of trees the muddy James went murmuring down its
muddy banks, where the blue cranes waited solemnly for the ebbing tide;
where the crows cawed hoarsely in their busy, reeling flight, and the
buzzards swung high above the marshes. Yet even in this waste of
listless desolation came the echoed boom of heavy guns far down the
river, where the "Rebs" and "Yanks" were pounding one another lazily.

From the woods which skirted the carriage road a man appeared--a thin,
worn man, in a uniform of stained and tattered gray--a man who peered
from right to left, as a hunted rabbi