FORE:For a moment I quite forgot how evident it was that she had gathered earlier inklings of it from some one else. Suddenly my thought was of something far more startling. It stopped my breath; I halted; I held my temples; I stared. What would she do with a secret she had taken such hazards to extort? Ah! she'd carry it straight to market--why not? She would give it to the enemy! Before my closed eyes came a vision of the issue--disaster to our arms; bleeding, maiming, death, and widows' and orphans' tears.

FORE:"Then take my parole! I give it! you have it! I'll take the chances.""Ah! Major, that is not fair to Quinn!" said Ferry. Yet when he took up the paper again he gazed on it with a happy gravity; it made him a captain. "By the by," he said, "that Yankee horse that Dick Smith captured at Sessions's; I'd like to buy that horse from you, Major." They made the sale. "And there's that captured ambulance still here, Major, with its team eating their heads off."

FORE:"But," I responded, "you put it on for a better reason than you could tell me then or can tell me now, though now I know your story."

FORE:��No, she shan��t talk and cry. I��ll take care of that. I��ll act policeman. But I can��t promise you that she��ll understand. I should think nothing more unlikely.��And then he remembered the sudden growth of beard, and decided that it was useless to pursue that last thin thread of suspicion in his mind. For several seconds he said nothing at all, and the Clockwork man seemed to take advantage of the pause in order to wind himself up to a new pitch of coherency.

FORE:Lord Inverbroom sauntered about in the grazing, ambulatory fashion of the book-lover and when his quarter of an hour was already more than spent, he put the volume he was examining back{275} into its place again with a certain air of decision.A JAPANESE VILLAGE.--BAMBOO POLES READY FOR MARKET. A JAPANESE VILLAGE.��BAMBOO POLES READY FOR MARKET.

FORE:Not slow-spoken did we find the command when we reached the road where they were falling into line. After a brief but vain pursuit, here were almost the haste and tumult of the onset; the sweat of it still reeked on everyone; the ground was strewn with its wreckage and its brute and human dead, and the pools of their blood were still warm. Squarely across the middle of the road, begrimed with dust, and with a dead Federal under him and another on top, lay the big white-footed pacer. At one side the enemy's fallen wounded were being laid in the shade to be left behind. In our ranks, here was a man with an arm in a bloody handkerchief, there one with his head so bound, and yonder a young fellow jesting wildly while he let his garments be cut and a flesh-wound in his side be rudely stanched. Here there was laughter at one who had been saved by his belt-buckle, and here at one who had dropped like dead from his horse, but had caught another horse and charged on. But these details imply a delay where in fact there was none; the moment Ferry spied me he asked "Did he get across?" and while I answered he motioned me into the line. Then he changed it into a column, commanded silence, and led us across country eastward. For those few wounded who would not give up their places in the ranks it was a weary ten miles that brought us swiftly back to a point within five miles of that Clifton which we had left in the morning. And yet a lovely ten miles it was, withal. You would hardly have known this tousled crowd for the same dandy crew that had smiled so flippantly upon me at sunrise, though they smiled as flippantly now with faces powder-blackened, hair and eyelashes matted and gummed with sweat and dust, and shoulders and thighs caked with grime. Yet to Ned Ferry as well as to me--I saw it in his eye every time he looked at them--these grimy fellows did more to beautify those ten miles than did June woods beflowered and perfumed with magnolia, bay and muscadine, or than slant sunlight in glade or grove.