Respectfully,

PERCIVAL SMITH, B. G. U. S. A.

Comdt., U. S. P., Point Lookout.

Mason returned the letter to its envelope and leaned back in his chair thinking.  It was one of the many messages of sorrow that had winged their way through the country in the weeks following the close of the war; one of the murmurs of pain that had swelled the funeral dirge vibrating through the land.

Pocahontas came and seated herself on her brother’s knee, gazing at him with wide gray eyes filled with inquiry.  “When did this come?  I never saw it before,” she questioned, gravely.

Then with troubled brow, and voice that grew husky at times, he went over for her the sad story of the last months of the last year of that unhappy and fateful struggle.  In the autumn of ’64 their brother Temple, a lad of seventeen, had been taken prisoner, with others of his troop, while making a reconnoissance, and they had been unable to discover either his condition or place of incarceration.  Mason, himself, had been at home on sick leave, weak and worn with the loss of his arm and a saber cut across his head.  All through the winter and spring, while calamity followed calamity with stunning rapidity, the wearing anxiety about Temple continued, made more intolerable by the contradictory reports of his fate brought by passing soldiers.  Finally, this letter had arrived and converted a dread fear into a worse certainty.

It had been handed to Roy Garnett by a Federal officer at Richmond, and Roy had ridden straight down with it all those weary miles, feeling curiously certain that it contained news of Temple, and sharing their anxiety to the full.  Roy had been stanch and helpful in their trouble, aiding in the hurried preparations for the journey, and accompanying the wounded man, and the pale, resolute mother on their desperate mission.  Then came the hideous journey, the arrival at the prison, the fearful questioning, the relief akin to pain of the reply; the interview with the bluff, kindly commandant, who took their hands heartily and rendered them every assistance in his power.  Then, in the rough hospital of the hostile prison, the strange, sad waiting for the end, followed by the stranger, sadder home-coming.  It was a pitiful story, common enough both north and south—­but none the less pitiful for its commonness.

With her head down on her brother’s shoulder, Pocahontas sobbed convulsively.  She was familiar with the outlines of the tale, and knew vaguely of the weeks of anxiety that had lined her mother’s gentle face and silvered her brown hair, but of all particulars she was ignorant.  She had been very young at the time these sad events occurred; the young brother sleeping in the shadow of the cedars in the old burying-ground was scarcely more than a name to her, and the memories of her childhood had faded somewhat, crowded out by the cheerful realities of her glad girl-life.