I could see by Ferry\'s face that there was no worse news. He met me aside, and privately bade me go to Roy\'s (where Charlotte was). "Kendall is there," he said; "I leave you and him in charge. That will rest your horses. Kendall has your Yankee horse, his own is sick. You and Kendall get all the sleep you can, you may get none to-night."

"Lieutenant," I began eagerly as he was drawing away, "is--?"

"Yes! oh, yes, yes!" His eyes danced, and a soft laugh came, as happy as a child\'s. "The surgeon is yonder, he will tell you."

This person Kendall and I had the luck to meet at the Roy\'s breakfast-table. "Yes, left lung," he said. "No, hardly \'perforated,\' but the top deeply grazed." The ball, he said, had passed on and out, and he went into particulars with me, while I wondered if Kendall knew, as I did, what parts of the body the pleura, the thorax, the clavicle and the pyemia were.

We lay down to sleep on some fodder in the Widow Roy\'s stable, while around three sides of the place, in a deep wooded hollow, Quinn and the company, well guarded by hidden videttes, drowsed in secret bivouac. I dreamed. I had feared I should, and it would have been a sort of bitter heart\'s-ease to tell Kendall of my own particular haunting trouble. For now, peril and darkness, storm, hard riding, the uproar and rage of man-killing, all past and gone, my special private wretchedness came back to me bigger than ever, like a neglected wound stiffened and swollen as it has grown cold. But Kendall would not talk, and when I dreamed, my dream was not of Camille. It seemed to me there was a hot fight on at the front, and that I, in a sweat of terror, was at the rear, hiding among the wagons and telling Gholson pale-faced lies as to why I was there. All at once Gholson became Oliver, alive, bloody-handed, glaring on me spectrally, cursing, threatening, and demanding his wife. His head seemed not "laid wide open," but to have only a streak of the skull bared by Ferry\'s glancing left-cut and a strip of the scalp turned inside out. Cécile drew his head down and showed it to me, in a transport of reproaches, as though my false report had wronged no one else so ruinously as her.

I awoke aghast. If Kendall had still been with me I might, in the first flush of my distress, have told my vision; but in the place where Kendall had lain lay Harry Helm. Kendall was gone; a long beam of afternoon sunlight shone across my lair through a chink in the log stable. I sprang half up with an exclamation, and Harry awoke with a luxurious yawn and smile. Kendall, he said, had left with the company, which had marched. Quinn was in command and had told Harry that he was only going to show the enemy that there was no other hostile force in their front, and get himself chased away southeastward.

"I don\'t know whether he was telling me the truth or not," said Helm, as we led our saddled horses toward the house; "I reckon he didn\'t want me alongside of him with this arm in a sling." The hand was bad; lines of pain were on the aide\'s face. He had taken the dead Louisianian home, got back to camp, and ridden down here to get the latest news concerning Charlotte. Kendall had already given him our story of the night; I had to answer only one inquiry. "Oh, yes," was my reply, "head laid wide open!" But to think of my next meeting with Ned Ferry almost made me sick.

Harry was delighted. "That lays their way wide open--Ned\'s and hers! Smith, some God-forsaken fool brought a chaplain here to talk religion to her! He hasn\'t seen her--Doctor wouldn\'t let him; but he\'s here yet, and--George! if I was them I\'d put him to a better use than what he came here for, and I\'d do it so quick it would make his head swim!" He went on into all the arguments for it; the awkwardnesses of Charlotte\'s new situation, her lack of means for even a hand-to-mouth daily existence, and so on. Seeing an ambulance coming in through the front gate, and in order not to lose the chance for my rejoinder, I interrupted. "Lieutenant, she will not allow it! She will make him wait a proper time before he may as much as begin a courtship, and then he will have to begin at the beginning. She\'s not going to let Ned Ferry narrow or lower her life or his--no, neither of them is going to let the other do it--because a piece of luck has laid the way wide open!" I ended with a pomp of prophecy, yet I could hear Ned Ferry saying again, with Charlotte\'s assenting eyes in his, "There is no turning back."

The driver of the ambulance did not know why he had been ordered to report here, but when the Widow Roy came to the door she brought explanation enough. A courier had come to her and gone again, and the chaplain and the surgeon and every one else of any "army sort" except us two had "put out," and she was in a sad flurry. "The Lieutenant," she said, "writes in this-yeh note that this-yeh place won\'t be safe f\'om the Yankees much longer\'n to-day, and fo\' us to send the wounded lady in the avalanch. Which she says, her own self, it\'d go rough with her to fall into they hands again. My married daughter she\'s a-goin\' with her, and the\'d ought to be a Mr. Sm\'--oh, my Lawdy! you ain\'t reg-lahly in the ahmy, air you?"

With some slave men to help us, Harry and I bore Charlotte out and laid her in the ambulance, mattress and all, on an under bedding of fodder. She had begged off from opiates, and was as full of the old starlight as if the day, still strong, were gone. I helped the married daughter up beside the driver, Harry and I mounted, and we set forth for the brigade camp. Mrs. Roy\'s daughter had with her a new romance, which she had been reading to Charlotte. Now............