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"Who--o?" It was not one who asked; the whos came like shrapnel; and when, not knowing what else to do, I smiled as one dying, there went up a wail of mirth that froze my blood and then heated it to a fever. The company howled. They rolled over one another, crying, "Charlie Toliver!--Charlie Toliver!--Oh, Lord, where's Scott Gholson!--Charlie Toliver!"--and leaped up and huddled down and moaned and rolled and rose and looked for me.

"Why, I suppose I'm to find there a road down Cole's Creek to Clifton."

"Too warm?"

"You sa-ay 'What we a-doin' hyuh?' Well, suh, I mought sa-ay we ain't a-doin' nuth'n'; but I"--he squirted again--"will sa-ay that so fah as you see what we a-doin', you kin see, an' welcome; an' so fah as you don't see, it ain't none o' yo' damn' busi-ness."

"Oh, that's all right, I was only asking a friendly question."

But why, then, this ardent zeal to save the necks of the two traitors "whose roof this night--" etc.? Manifestly she was moved by passion, not duty; love drove her on; but surely not love for them. "No," I guessed in a reverent whisper, "but love for Ned Ferry." It must have been through grace of some of her nobility and his, caught in my heart even before I was quite sure of it in theirs, that I sat and framed the following theory: Ned Ferry, loving Charlotte Oliver, yet coerced by his sense of a soldier's duty, had put passion's dictates wholly aside and had set about to bring these murderers to justice; doing this though he knew that she could never with honor or happiness to either of them become the wife of a man who had made her a widow, while she, aware of his love, a love so true that he would not breathe it to her while this hideous marriage held her, had ridden perilously in the dead of night to circumvent his plans if, with honor to both of them, it could be done.

"Why, I keep the plain road, don't I?"

I remarked that had I been in her place I should either have sunk into the mire, so to speak, or thrown myself, literally, into the river.

"Yes; well, she came to us that night, round the enemy's right, with a letter from Major Harper's brother--he was then in New Orleans--and with information of her own that saved the brigade. I had just got my company. I took it off next morning on my first scout, whilst the brigade went to Raymond. She was my guide all that day; six times she was my guide before the end of May. Yet the most I have learned about her has come to me in the last few days."

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