Once more we were in the by-road which had brought us westward parallel with the highway. The prisoner drove. Aunt Martha sat beside him, slim, dark, black-eyed, stately, her silver-gray hair rolled high à la Pompadour. With a magnanimity rare in those bitter days she incited him to talk, first of New Orleans, where he had spent a month in camp on one of the public squares, and then of his far northern home, and of loved ones there, mother, wife and child. The nieces, too, gave a generous attention. Only I, riding beside the hind wheels, held solemnly aloof.

"Front!" I once snapped out with a ring that made the trees reply and the ladies catch their breath. "If you steal one more look back here I\'ll put a ball into your leg."

He smiled, chirped the horses up and resumed his chat. I heard him praise my horse and compare him not unfavorably with his own which he had lost that morning\'. He and a few picked men had been surprised in a farmhouse at breakfast. They had made a leap and a dash, he said, but one horse and rider falling dead, his horse, unhurt, had tumbled over them, and here was his rider.

I prompted Camille to ask if he had ever encountered Ned Ferry, and he laughed.

"No," he said, but Ned Ferry had lately restored to him, by proxy, some lost letters, with an invitation to come and see him.

I laughed insolently. The young ladies sparkled, and so did Miss Harper, as she asked him who had been the proxy.

He said the proxy was a young woman who had a knack of getting passes through the lines, and the three girls exchanged looks as knowing as they were delighted.

"I tell her as a friend," he said, "she\'ll get one into Fortress Monroe yet!"

Miss Harper\'s keen eyes glittered. "You northerners hardly realize our feelings concerning the imprisonment of women, I think."

"My dear madam, you don\'t realize ours. We don\'t want to imprison women."

So there came a silence, and then a gay laugh as three of us at once asked if he had ever heard of Lieutenant Durand. "Durand!" he cried, and looked squarely around at me. I lifted the cocked revolver, but he kept his fine eyes on mine and I rubbed my ear with my wrist. "What?" he said, "an elegant, Creole-seeming young fellow, very handsome? Why, that fellow saved my life this very afternoon."

The young ladies were in rapture. Miss Harper asked how he had done it.

"If I tell you that," said the Captain, "you won\'t like me the least bit."

............