“I reckon he fell on it,” said Colonel Catesby Jennison, as if it were a matter of no special note.

“And now tell me something,” said Stephen.  “How did you burn our sap-rollers?”

This time the Colonel stopped, and gave himself up to hearty laughter.

“Why, that was a Yankee trick, sure enough,” he cried.  “Some ingenious cuss soaked port fire in turpentine, and shot the wad in a large-bore musket.”

“We thought you used explosive bullets.”

The Colonel laughed again, still more heartily.  “Explosive bullets!  —­Good Lord, it was all we could do to get percussion caps.  Do you know how we got percussion caps, seh?  Three of our officers—­dare-devils, seh —­floated down the Mississippi on logs.  One fellow made his way back with two hundred thousand.  He’s the pride of our Vicksburg army.  Not afraid of hell.  A chivalrous man, a forlorn-hope man.  The night you ran the batteries he and some others went across to your side in skiffs—­in skiffs, seh, I say—­and set fire to the houses in De Soto, that we might see to shoot.  And then he came back in the face of our own batteries and your guns.  That man was wounded by a trick of fate, by a cussed bit of shell from your coehorns while eating his dinner in Vicksburg.  He’s pretty low, now, poor fellow,” added the Colonel, sadly.

“Where is he?” demanded Stephen, fired with a desire to see the man.

“Well, he ain’t a great ways from here,” said the Colonel.  “Perhaps you might be able to do something for him,” he continued thoughtfully.  “I’d hate to see him die.  The doctor says he’ll pull through if he can get care and good air and good food.”  He seized Stephen’s arm in a fierce grip.  “You ain’t fooling?” he said.

“Indeed I am not,” said Stephen.

“No,” said the Colonel, thoughtfully, as to himself, “you don’t look like the man to fool.”

Whereupon he set out with great strides, in marked contrast to his former languorous gait, and after a while they came to a sort of gorge, where the street ran between high banks of clay.  There Stephen saw the magazines which the Confederates had dug out, and of which he had heard.  But he saw something, too, of which he had not heard, Colonel Catesby Jennison stopped before an open doorway in the yellow bank and knocked.  A woman’s voice called softly to him to enter.

They went into a room hewn out of the solid clay.  Carpet was stretched on the floor, paper was on the walls, and even a picture.  There was a little window cut like a port in a prison cell, and under it a bed, beside which a middle-aged lady was seated.  She had a kindly face which seemed to Stephen a little pinched as she turned to them with a gesture of restraint.  She pointed to the bed, where a sheet lay limply over the angles of a wasted frame.  The face was to the wall.

“Hush!” said the lady,—­“it is the first time in two days that he has slept.”