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246 negro, with his staff in hand, and with white teeth peering through his thick, flagging lips, in a sort of deferential smile, at their approach. Sometimes, touched with the apprehensions of the time, he too would start away as he beheld them, and they might see him, as they looked backward, cautiously watching their progress from behind the pine-tree, or the crumbling fence. Occasionally they came to a dwelling in ruins, or burnt—the cornfield scorched and blackened with the recent fire, the fences overthrown, and the cows, almost wild, having free possession, and staring wildly upon them as they drew nigh.

"And this is war!" said Singleton, musingly. "This is war—the merciless, the devastating war! Oh, my country, when wilt thou be free from invasion—when will thy people come back to these deserted dwellings—when will the corn flourish green along these stricken and blasted fields, without danger from the trampling horse, and the wanton and devouring fire? When—oh, when?"

He spoke almost unconsciously, but was recalled to himself, as, wondering at what he heard, the peering eyes of Lance Frampton, as he rode up beside him, perused keenly the unusually sad expression of his countenance. Singleton noted his gaze, and, without rebuking it, addressed him with a question concerning his father, who had been missing from the troop ever since the affair with Travis.

"Lance, have you heard nothing of your father since I last asked you about him?"

"Nothing, sir; nothing at all, since we left the Cypress."

"You did not see him then, at our departure?"

"No, sir; but I heard him laugh long after I missed him from the troop. He couldn't have been far off, sir, when we came out of the swamp; though I didn't see him then, and—and—I didn't want to see him."

"Why not, boy?—your father, too!"

"Why, sir, father is very strange sometimes, and then we never talk to him or trouble him, and he don't want people to see him then. We always know how he is when he laughs, sir, and then we go out of his way. We know he is strange then, for he never laughs at any other time."