As they left Virginia and entered North Carolina they heard that the Confederate troops everywhere were surrendering.  The war, which had been so terrible and sanguinary only two or three months before, ended absolutely with the South’s complete exhaustion.  Already the troops were going home by the scores of thousands.  They saw men who had just taken off their uniforms guiding the ploughs in the furrows.  Smoke rose once more from the chimneys of the abandoned homes, and the boys who had faced the cannon’s mouth were rebuilding rail fences.  The odor of grass and newly turned earth was poignant and pleasant.  The two colonels expanded.

“Though my years have been devoted to military pursuits, Hector,” said Colonel Leonidas Talbot, “the agricultural life is noble, and many of the hardy virtues of the South are due to the fact that we are chiefly a rural population.”

“Truly spoken, Leonidas, but for four years agriculture has not had much chance with us, and perhaps agriculture is not all.  It was the mechanical genius of the North that kept us from taking New York and Boston.”

“Which reminds me, Happy,” said St. Clair to Langdon, “that, after all, you didn’t sleep in the White House at Washington with your boots on.”

“I changed my mind,” replied Happy easily.  “I didn’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings.”

Soon they entered the mountains, and they met many Confederate soldiers returning to their homes.  Harry always sought from them news of his father, and he learned at last that he was somewhere in the western part of the state.  Then he heard, a day or two later, that a band of guerrillas to the south of them were plundering and sometimes murdering.  They believed from what details they could gather that it was Slade and Skelly with a new force, and they thought it advisable to turn much farther toward the west.

“The longest way ’round is sometimes the shortest way through,” said Sergeant Whitley, and the others agreed with him.  They came into a country settled then but little.  The mountains were clothed in deep forest, now in the full glory of early spring, and the log cabins were few.  Usually they slept, the nights through, in the forest, and they helped out their food supply with game.  The sergeant shot two deer, and they secured wild turkeys and quantities of smaller game.

Although they heard that the guerrillas were moving farther west, which necessitated the continuation of their own course in that direction, they seemed to have entered another world.  Where they were, at least, there was nothing but peace, the peace of the wilderness which made a strong appeal to all of them.  In the evenings by their campfire in the forest De Langeais would often play for them on his violin, and the great trees about them seemed to rustle with approval, as a haunting melody came back in echoes from the valleys.

They had been riding a week through a wilderness almost unbroken when, just before sunset, they heard a distant singing sound, singularly like that of De Langeais’ violin.