rillas an' bushwhackers tuk it out on the old hotel, sure!"
observed Sim Roxby, by way of introduction. "Thar warn't much fightin'
hyar-abouts, an' few sure-enough soldiers ever kem along. But wunst in a
while a band o' guerrillas went through like a suddint wind-storm, an'
I tell ye they made things whurl while they war about it. They made a
sorter barracks o' the old place. Looks some like lightning hed struck
it."

He had reined up his horse about one hundred yards in front of the
edifice, where the weed-grown gravelled drive--carefully tended ten
years agone--had diverged from the straight avenue of poplars, sweeping
in a circle around to the broad flight of steps.

"Though," he qualified abruptly, as if a sudden thought had struck
him, "ef ye air countin' on buyin' it, a leetle money spent ter keerful
purpose will go a long way toward makin' it ez good ez new."

His companion did not reply, and for the first time Roxby cast upon him
a covert glance charged with the curiosity which would have been earlier
and more easily aroused in another man by the manner of the stranger. A
letter--infrequent missive in his experience--had come from an ancient
companion-in-arms, his former colonel, requesting him in behalf of a
friend of the old commander to repair to the railway station, thirty
miles distant, to meet and guide this prospective purchaser of the old
hotel to the site of the property. And now as Roxby looked at him the
suspicion which his kind heart had not been quick to entertain was
seized upon by his alert brain.

"The cunnel's been fooled somehows," he said to himself.

For the look with which John Dundas contemplated the place was not the
gaze of him concerned with possible investment--with the problems of
repair, the details of the glazier and the painter and the plasterer.
The mind was evidently neither braced for resistance nor resigned to
despair, as behooves one smitten by the foreknowledge of the certainty
of the excess of the expenditures over the estimates. Only with pensive,
listless melancholy, void of any intention, his eyes traversed the
long rows of open doors, riven by rude hands from their locks, swinging
helplessly to and fro in the wind, and giving to the deserted and
desolate old place a spurious air of motion and life. Many of the
shutters had been wrenched from their hinges, and lay rotting on the
floors. The ball-room windows caught on their shattered glass the
reflection of the clouds