It seemed to them both that they had lived almost all their lives in war.  Even Jeb Stuart’s ball, stopped by the opening guns of a great battle, was far, far away, and to Harry, it was at least a century since he had closed his Tacitus in the Pendleton Academy, and put it away in his desk.  That old Roman had written something of battles, but they were no such struggles as Chancellorsville and Gettysburg had been.  The legions, he admitted in his youthful pride, could fight well, but they never could have beaten Yank or Reb.

He and Dalton slept through the afternoon and directly after dark, well equipped and well-armed, they made their start into the South.  But in going they did not neglect to pass the camp of the Invincibles who were now in the apex of the army farthest south.  They had found an unusually comfortable place on a grassy plot beside a fine, cool spring, and most of them were lying down.  But Colonel Talbot and Lieutenant-Colonel Hector St. Hilaire sat on empty kegs, with a board on an empty box between them.  The great game which ran along with the war had been renewed.  St. Clair and Langdon sat on the grass beside them, watching the contest.

The two colonels looked up at the sound of hoofs and paused a moment.

“I’m getting his king into a close corner, Harry,” said Colonel Talbot, “and he’ll need a lot of time for thinking.  Where are you two going, or perhaps I shouldn’t ask you such a question?”

“There’s no secret about it,” replied Harry.  “We’re going to Richmond with dispatches.”

“He was incorrect in saying that he was getting my king into a close corner, as I’ll presently show him,” said Lieutenant-Colonel St. Hilaire; “but you boys are lucky.  I suppose you’ll stay a while in the capital.  You’ll sleep in white beds, you’ll eat at tables, with tablecloths on ’em.  You’ll hear the soft voices of the women and girls of the South, God bless ’em!”

“And if you went on to Charleston you’d find just as fine women there,” said Colonel Leonidas Talbot.

He sighed and a shade of sadness crossed his face.  Harry heard and saw and understood.  He remembered a night long, long ago in that heat of rebellion, when he had looked down from the window of his room, and, in the dark, had seen two figures, a man and a woman, upon a piazza, Colonel Talbot and Madame Delaunay, talking softly together.  He had felt then that he was touching almost unconsciously upon the thread of an old romance.  A thread slender and delicate, but yet strong enough in its very tenderness and delicacy to hold them both.  The perfume of the flowers and of the old romance that night in the town so far away came back.  He was moved, and when his eyes met Colonel Talbot’s some kind of an understanding passed between them.

“The good are never rewarded,” said Happy Tom.

“How so?” asked Harry.