The November day was dead, sunless:  since morning the sky had had only enough life in it to sweat out a few muddy drops, that froze as they fell:  the cold numbed his mouth as he breathed it.  This stubbly slope was where he and his grandfather had headed the deer:  it was covered with hundreds of dirty, yellow tents now.  Around there were hills like uncouth monsters, swathed in ice, holding up the soggy sky; shivering pine-forests; unmeaning, dreary flats; and the Cheat, coiled about the frozen sinews of the hills, limp and cold, like a cord tying a dead man’s jaws.  Whatever outlook of joy or worship this region had borne on its face in time gone, it turned to him to-day nothing but stagnation, a great death.  He wondered idly, looking at it, (for the old Huguenot brain of the man was full of morbid fancies,) if it were winter alone that had deadened color and pulse out of these full-blooded hills, or if they could know the colder horror crossing their threshold, and forgot to praise God as it came.

Over that farthest ridge the house had stood.  The guard (he had been taken by a band of Snake-hunters, back in the hills) had brought him past it.  It was a heap of charred rafters.  “Burned in the night,” they said, “when the old Colonel was alone.”  They were very willing to show him this, as it was done by his own party, the Secession “Bush-whackers”; took him to the wood-pile to show him where his grandfather had been murdered, (there was a red mark,) and buried, his old hands above the ground.  “Colonel said ’t was a job fur us to pay up; so we went to the village an’ hed a scrimmage,”—­pointing to gaps in the hedges where the dead Bush-whackers yet lay unburied.  He looked at them, and at the besotted faces about him, coolly.

Snake-hunters and Bush-whackers, he knew, both armies used in Virginia as tools for rapine and murder:  the sooner the Devil called home his own, the better.  And yet, it was not God’s fault, surely, that there were such tools in the North, any more than that in the South Ben was—­Ben.  Something was rotten in freer States than Denmark, he thought.

One of the men went into the hedge, and brought out a child’s golden ringlet as a trophy.  Lamar glanced in, and saw the small face in its woollen hood, dimpled yet, though dead for days.  He remembered it.  Jessy Birt, the ferryman’s little girl.  She used to come up to the house every day for milk.  He wondered for which flag she died.  Ruth was teaching her to write. Ruth! Some old pain hurt him just then, nearer than even the blood of the old man or the girl crying to God from the ground.  The sergeant mistook the look.  “They’ll be buried,” he said, gruffly.  “Ye brought it on yerselves.”  And so led him to the Federal camp.