While the snow fell faster—­without, he stopped writing, and began idly drawing a map of Georgia on the tan-bark with a stick.  Here the Federal troops could effect a landing:  he knew the defences at that point.  If they did?  He thought of these Snake-hunters who had found in the war a peculiar road for themselves downward with no gallows to stumble over, fancied he saw them skulking through the fields at Cedar Creek, closing around the house, and behind them a mass of black faces and bloody bayonets.  Floy alone, and he here,—­like a rat in a trap!  “God keep my little girl!” he wrote, unsteadily.  “God bless you, Floy!” He gasped for breath, as if he had been writing with his heart’s blood.  Folding up the paper, he hid it inside his shirt and began his dogged walk, calculating the chances of escape.  Once out of this shed, he could baffle a blood-hound, he knew the hills so well.

His head bent down, he did not see a man who stood looking at him over the wicket.  Captain Dorr.  A puny little man, with thin yellow hair, and womanish face:  but not the less the hero of his men,—­they having found out, somehow, that muscle was not the solidest thing to travel on in war-times.  Our regiments of “roughs” were not altogether crowned with laurel at Manassas!  So the men built more on the old Greatheart soul in the man’s blue eyes:  one of those souls born and bred pure, sent to teach, that can find breath only in the free North.  His hearty “Hillo!” startled Lamar.

“How are you, old fellow?” he said, unlocking the gate and coming in.

Lamar threw off his wretched thoughts, glad to do it.  What need to borrow trouble?  He liked a laugh,—­had a lazy, jolly humor of his own.  Dorr had finished drill, and come up, as he did every day, to freshen himself with an hour’s talk to this warm, blundering fellow.  In this dismal war-work, (though his whole soul was in that, too,) it was like putting your hands to a big blaze.  Dorr had no near relations; Lamar—­they had played marbles together—­stood to him where a younger brother might have stood.  Yet, as they talked, he could not help his keen eye seeing him just as he was.

Poor John! he thought:  the same uncouth-looking effort of humanity that he had been at Yale.  No wonder the Northern boys jeered him, with his sloth-ways, his mouthed English, torpid eyes, and brain shut up in that worst of mud-moulds,—­belief in caste.  Even now, going up and down the tan-bark, his step was dead, sodden, like that of a man in whose life God had not yet wakened the full live soul.  It was wakening, though, Dorr thought.  Some pain or passion was bringing the man in him out of the flesh, vigilant, alert, aspirant.  A different man from Dorr.

In fact, Lamar was just beginning to think for himself, and of course his thoughts were defiant, intolerant.  He did not comprehend how his companion could give his heresies such quiet welcome, and pronounce sentence of death on them so coolly.  Because Dorr had gone farther up the mountain, had he the right to make him follow in the same steps?  The right,—­that was it.  By brute force, too?  Human freedom, eh?  Consequently, their talks were stormy enough.  To-day, however, they were on trivial matters.