“Come to my room.  I want to show you a present I got to-night.”  Then silence.  Wesley had no watch.  The rebels had relieved him of that at Bull Run.  But it must be quite midnight.  He opened one of the windows softly.  Oh, the glory of the night, harbinger of his high emprise, his deathless glory!  The wondrous, wondrous stillness of the scene—­and to think that over yonder, in the dark depths of the forest, fifty, perhaps a hundred, men were waiting for him—­for him?  Yes, the mighty arms of the Union were about him; the trump of a fame, such as no song had ever sung, was poised to blow to the world his daring.  Hark!  Heavens, yes; the long, tender plaint of the whippoorwill.  Ah! now, now there was no doubt.  In swooning delight he waits.  Good Heaven!  What’s that sound?  Angels and ministers of grace, the dead in wailing woe over the deed about to be done?  Ah! he breathes.

Pizarro has grown tired of imprisonment and has set up an expostulatory wail, facetiously impatient at first, but now breaking into sharp yelps.  This will never do.  He must stop that ear-splitting outcry, or the househould will be awakened.  That sharp-eyed, razor tongued young devil, Dick, is just across the hall.  Wesley opens the closet door, and Pizarro bounds out, licking his jailer’s hands in grateful acknowledgment.  He frisks, appealing to the room door, inviting the further favor of being permitted to go to his post, his wagging tail explaining how necessary it is that a dog intrusted with such important duties as the guardianship of the household can not suffer the casual claims of friendlessness or the comity of surreptitious feeding to lure him into infidelity.  The tail proving ineffectual in argument, Pizarro supplemented its eloquence by sharp admonitory yelps, tempered by a sharp crescendo whining, of which he seemed rather proud as an accomplishment.

“Damn the brute!  He will ruin everything.  I must kill him.”  But how?  He had no weapon.  He looked about the room in gasping terror—­the dog accepting the move as a sign that the eloquence of the tail argument had proved overpowering, supplemented this by an explosion of ecstatic yelps of a deep, bass volume, that murdered the deep silence of the night, like salvos of pistols.  The curtains to the windows were held in place by stout dimity bands.  Whispering soothingly to the dog, Wesley knotted four of these together, and, making as if to open the door, slipped the bands like a lasso over the head of the unsuspecting brute.  In an instant his howls were silenced.  The dog, with protruding tongue and eyes—­that had the piteous pleading and reproach of the human, looked up at him, bloodshot and failing.  But now the second signal must be near!  He may have missed it in the infernal howling of the brute.  Yes, that was it.  He looks out of the window; his room is in view of the covered way to the kitchen.  He sees moving figures; he hears voices.  They are there.  He has missed the signal; he must hasten to them.  He puts out the lights and opens the door cautiously.  All is invitingly, reassuringly still.  He is at the hall door in a minute, in another he is with the shadows in the rear of the house.