“Surrender!” he said, hoarsely.

His answer was a convulsive struggle and then the Yankee lay still.

“Surrender!” said Dan again, lifting his knife above the Yankee’s breast, “or, damn you, I’ll—­”

The Yankee had turned his face weakly toward the fire, and Dan, with a cry of horror, threw his knife away and sprang to his feet.  Straightway the Yankee’s closed eyes opened and he smiled faintly.

“Why, Dan, is that you?” he asked.  “I thought it would come,” he added, quietly, and then Harry Dean lapsed into unconsciousness.

Thus, at its best, this fratricidal war was being fought out that daybreak in one little hollow of the Kentucky mountains and thus, at its worst, it was being fought out in another little hollow scarcely twenty yards away, where the giant twins—­Rebel Jerry and Yankee Jake—­who did know they were brothers, sought each other’s lives in mutual misconception and mutual hate.

There were a dozen dead Federals and guerillas around the fire, and among them was Daws Dillon with the pallor of death on his face and the hate that life had written there still clinging to it like a shadow.  As Dan bent tenderly over his brother Harry, two soldiers brought in a huge body from the bushes, and he turned to see Rebel Jerry Dillon.  There were a half a dozen rents in his uniform and a fearful slash under his chin—­but he was breathing still.  Chad Buford had escaped and so had Yankee Jake.

CHAPTER 27.  AT THE HOSPITAL OF MORGAN’S MEN

In May, Grant simply said—­Forward!  The day he crossed the Rapidan, he said it to Sherman down in Georgia.  After the battle of the Wilderness he said it again, and the last brutal resort of hammering down the northern buttress and sea-wall of the rebellion—­old Virginia—­and Atlanta, the keystone of the Confederate arch, was well under way.  Throughout those bloody days Chad was with Grant and Harry Dean was with Sherman on his terrible trisecting march to the sea.  For, after the fight between Rebels and Yankees and Daws Dillon’s guerilla band, over in Kentucky, Dan, coming back from another raid into the Bluegrass, had found his brother gone.  Harry had refused to accept a parole and had escaped.  Not a man, Dan was told, fired a shot at him, as he ran.  One soldier raised his musket, but Renfrew the Silent struck the muzzle upward.

In September, Atlanta fell and, in that same month, Dan saw his great leader, John Morgan, dead in Tennessee.  In December, the Confederacy toppled at the west under Thomas’s blows at Nashville.  In the spring of ’65, one hundred and thirty-five thousand wretched, broken-down rebels, from Richmond to the Rio Grande, confronted Grant’s million men, and in April, Five Forks was the beginning of the final end everywhere.