edge of the pines. The one in the torn butternut blouse hawked and spat, and the sound was strangely loud at the brink of that silence.
“I’d reckoned the Yanks was down in that there little town,” he said. “Channow, it’s called. Joe, you look like a Yank yourself in them clothes.”
His mate, who wore half-weathered blue, did not appear complimented. The garments had been stripped from an outraged sergeant of Pennsylvania Lancers, taken prisoner at the Seven Days. They fitted their new wearer’s lean body nicely, except across the shoulders. His boots were likewise trophies of war—from the Second Manassas, where the Union Army had learned that lightning can strike twice in the same place; and his saddle-cloth, with its U. S. stamp, had also been unwillingly furnished by the Federal army. But the gray horse had come from his father’s Virginia farm, and had lived through a year of fierce fighting and fiercer toil. The rider’s name was Joseph Paradine, and he had recently declined, with thanks, the offer of General J. E. B. Stuart to recommend him for a commission.
He preferred to serve as a common trooper. He was a chivalric idealist, and a peerless scout.
“You’d better steal some Yankee blues yourself, Dauger,” he advised. “Those homespun pants would drop off of you if you stood up in your stirrups. . . . Yes, the enemy’s expected to take up a position in Channow Valley. But if he had done so, we’d have run into his videttes by now, and that town would be as noisy as a county fair.”
He rode from among the pines and into the open on the lower slope.
“You’re plumb exposin’ yourself, Joe,” warned Dauger anxiously.
“And I’m going to expose myself more,” returned Paradine, his eyes on the valley. “We’ve been told to find the Yankees, establish their whereabouts. Then our people will tackle them.” He spoke with the confidence of triumph that in the summer of 1862 possessed Confederates who had driven the Union’s bravest and best all through Virginia. “I’m going all the way down.”
“There’ll be Yanks hidin’,” suggested Dauger pessimistically. “They’ll plug you plumb full of lead.”
“If they do,” called Paradine, “ride back and tell the boys, because then you’ll know the Yankees actually are in Channow.” He put his horse to the slope, feeling actually happy at the thought that he might suffer for the sake of his cause. It is worthy of repetition that he was a chivalric idealist.
Dauger, quite as brave but more practical, bode where he was. Paradine, riding downhill, passed out of reach of any more warnings.
Paradine’s eyes were kept on the village as he descended deep into silence as into water. He had never known such silence, not even at the frequent prayings of his very devout regiment. It made him nervous, a different nervousness from the tingling elation brought by battle thunders, and it fairly daunted his seasoned and intelligent horse. The beast tossed its head, sniffed, danced precariously, and had to be urged to the slope’s foot and the trail that ran there.
From the bottom of the slope, the village was a scant two miles away. Its chimneys did not smoke, nor did its trees stir in the windless air. Nor was there sign or motion upon its streets and among its houses of red brick and white wood—no enemy soldiers, or anything else.
Was this a trap? But Paradine smiled at the thought of a whole Yankee brigade or more, lying low to capture one lone Southerner.
More likely they thought him a friend,
