returned to him,—­he had saved her; he had done his duty.  And harping upon this in his strange fatalism, it at last seemed to him that this was for what he had lived—­for what he had suffered—­for what he had fitly ended his career.  Perhaps it was left for him now to pass his remaining years in forgotten exile—­even as his father had—­his father!—­his breath came quickly at the thought—­God knows! perhaps as wrongfully accused!  It may have been a Providence that she had borne him no child, to whom this dreadful heritage could be again transmitted.

There was something of this strange and fateful resignation in his face, a few hours later, when he was able to be helped again into the saddle.  But he could see in the eyes of the few comrades who commiseratingly took leave of him, a vague, half-repressed awe of some indefinite weakness in the man, that mingled with their heartfelt parting with a gallant soldier.  Yet even this touched him no longer.  He cast a glance at the house and the room where he had parted from her, at the slope from which she had passed—­and rode away.

And then, as his figure disappeared down the road, the restrained commentary of wonder, surmise, and criticism broke out:—­

“It must have been something mighty bad, for the old man, who swears by him, looked rather troubled.  And it was deuced queer, you know, this changing clothes with somebody, just before this surprise!”

“Nonsense!  It’s something away back of that!  Didn’t you hear the old man say that the orders for him to report himself came from Washington last night?  No!”—­the speaker lowered his voice—­“Strangeways says that he had regularly sold himself out to one of them d——­d secesh woman spies!  It’s the old Marc Antony business over again!”

“Now I think of it,” said a younger subaltern, “he did seem mightily taken with one of those quadroons or mulattoes he issued orders against.  I suppose that was a blind for us!  I remember the first day he saw her; he was regularly keen to know all about her.”

Major Curtis gave a short laugh.

“That mulatto, Martin, was a white woman, burnt-corked!  She was trying to get through the lines last night, and fell off a wall or got a knock on the head from a sentry’s carbine.  When she was brought in, Doctor Simmons set to washing the blood off her face; the cork came off and the whole thing came out.  Brant hushed it up—­and the woman, too—­in his own quarters!  It’s supposed now that she got away somehow in the rush!”

“It goes further back than that, gentlemen,” said the adjutant authoritatively.  “They say his wife was a howling secessionist, four years ago, in California, was mixed up in a conspiracy, and he had to leave on account of it.  Look how thick he and that Miss Faulkner became, before he helped her off!”

“That’s your jealousy, Tommy; she knew he was, by all odds, the biggest man here, and a good deal more, too, and you had no show!”