It was earliest spring, and almost the close of a day whose sunshine and warmth had coaxed into bloom many timid roadside flowers, and sent the white petals of farmyard cherries trembling to earth like tiny, belated snowfalls. Already the rays of the setting sun were gilding the open space on the top of the mountain where ridge-road and turnpike meet. The ridge-road was only one of the little mountain by-ways that wind through woods and up and down dale as the necessities of the mountain people wear them; the turnpike was an ancient artery connecting North and South, threading cities and villages and farms along its length like trophies on a chain. The shy windings of the mountain road knew nothing more modern than the doctor\'s vehicle drawn by White Rosy, nothing more exciting than the little companies of armed, silent men who tramped over it by night, or crossed it stealthily by day; but along the pike coaches and motor cars pounded and rolled, and a generation or so earlier an army had swung northward over it in pride and hope and eagerness, to drift southward again, a few days later, with only pride left. If, after that, the part of the old road that led from the plain up to the higher valley seemed to lie in a torpor, as if stunned by the agony of that retreat, none the less it remained one of the strong warp threads in Fate\'s fabric.