On the following day, old Mr. Wetherby came into the bank.  The lines about his mouth were rigid with suppressed feeling.  He handed Mr. Kemble a letter, saying in a husky voice, “Jim sent this.  He says at the end I was to show it to you.”  The scrawl gave in brief the details about Captain Nichol already known to the reader, and stated also that Sam Wetherby was missing.  “All I know is,” wrote the soldier, “that we were driven back, and bullets flew like hail.  The brush was so thick I couldn’t see five yards either way when I lost sight of Sam.”

The colonel of the regiment also wrote to Captain Nichol’s father, confirming Private Wetherby’s letter.  The village had been thrown into a ferment by the tidings of the battle and its disastrous consequences.  There was bitter lamentation in many homes.  Perhaps the names of Captain Nichol and Helen were oftenest repeated in the little community, for the fact of their mutual hopes was no longer a secret.  Even thus early some sagacious people nodded their heads and remarked, “Hobart Martine may have his chance yet.”  Helen Kemble believed without the shadow of a doubt that all the heart she had for love had perished in the wilderness.

The facts contained in Jim Wetherby’s letter were telegraphed to Martine, and he was not long in discovering confirmation of them in the temporary hospitals near the battlefield.  He found a man of Captain Nichol’s company to whom Jim had related the circumstances.  For days the loyal friend searched laboriously the horrible region of strife, often sickened nearly unto death by the scenes he witnessed, for his nature had not been rendered callous by familiarity with the results of war.  Then instead of returning home, he employed the influence given by his letters and passes, backed by his own earnest pleading, to obtain permission for a visit to Nichol’s regiment.  He found it under fire; and long afterward Jim Wetherby was fond of relating how quietly the lame civilian listened to the shells shrieking over and exploding around him.  Thus Martine learned all that could be gathered of Nichol’s fate, and then, ill and exhausted, he turned his face northward.  He felt that it would be a hopeless task to renew his search on the battlefield, much of which had been burned over.  He also had the conviction it would be fatal to him to look upon its unspeakable horrors, and breathe again its pestilential air.

He was a sick man when he arrived at home, but was able to relate modestly in outline the history of his efforts, softening and concealing much that he had witnessed.  In the delirium of fever which followed, they learned more fully of what he had endured, of how he had forced himself to look upon things which, reproduced in his ravings, almost froze the blood of his watchers.