flank of the enemy.  He had been seen at Heintzelman’s headquarters, but after that no one could trace him.  Wesley, too, had been left near the stone bridge with a ball in either his arm or thigh, the informant was not quite sure which, as he fell in a charge of the line.  Boone telegraphed to Kate that he was going through the lines with a flag of truce so soon as the affair could be regulated, and proffered his best offices for the Acredale victims.

Everything had been prepared by Olympia and her mother for an instant departure so soon as positive information came.  With them Marcia Perley went, trembling and tearful, and Telemachus Twigg, to extricate his son from danger, for it was uncertain what his status was in the forces.  Kate, too, joined the melancholy pilgrimage that set out one morning followed to the station by weeping kinsmen imploring the good offices of these ambassadors of woe.  The sleeping-car gave the miserable company seclusion, if not rest.  They were not the only ones in quest of the missing, for as yet there was no certainty as to the fate of those left on the field of battle.  Later reports had been more encouraging, for hundreds who were set down as prisoners or missing began to be heard from as far northward as the Maryland line.  In the station at Washington Boone met his daughter.  Twigg hurried to him and asked: 

“Any further news, Mr. Boone?  We’re all here—­about half Acredale.”

“Yes, I see; but there is no more news of the Caribees.  We learn that the wounded have been sent to Richmond, and I shall set out for there to-morrow.”

Mrs. Sprague, with Olympia and Merry, drove to the house of a friend she had known years before, whose husband was a Senator.  The Boones—­or rather Kate—­bade them a cordial adieu as they drove off to the National Hotel.

Then the most trying part of the quest began.  The War Department was besieged with applicants, mostly women.  Orders had been issued to forbid all crossing the lines, and the despairing kinsfolk of the lost were in a panic of impatient terror.  In vain Olympia called upon eminent Senators who had been friends of her father; in vain she invoked the aid of the Secretary of State, who had been the family’s guest at Acredale.  Once she penetrated, by the aid of strong letters, to the Secretary of War.  He was surrounded by a hurried throng of orderlies, officers, and clerks, and even after she had been admitted to his office Olympia was left unnoticed on a settee, waiting some sign to approach the dreaded presence.  His imperious and abrupt manner, his alternation of deferential concern for some and disdainful impatience for others, gave her small hope that he would heed her prayer.  She waited hours, sitting in the crowded room, ill from the oppressive air, the fixed stare of the officers, and the sobbing of others like herself waiting a word with the autocrat.  At length, late in the afternoon, when the crowd had quite gone, she heard the Secretary say in an undertone: