"A crape shawl for mother, and another for me; now don't you forget," said Mary; "and some fans and some ivory combs, and some of those funny little cups and saucers such as Aunt Amelia has, and some nice tea to drink out of them." OPIUM-PIPE. OPIUM-PIPE. Ned Ferry and I never saw Squire Wall's again. When our hand-car the next morning landed us in Hazlehurst the news of Gettysburg and Vicksburg was on every tongue, in every face, and a telegram awaited Ferry which changed his destination to Meridian, a hundred miles farther to the east. He kept me with him at Hazlehurst for two days, to help him and the post-quartermaster get everything ready to be moved and saved if our cavalry should be driven east of the Jackson Railroad. But it was not, and by and by we were sundered and I went and became at length in practical and continuous reality one of Ferry's scouts--minus Ferry. Oh, the long hot toils and pains of those July and August days! the scorching suns, the stumbling night-marches, the aching knees, the groaning beasts, the scant, foul rations, the dust and sweat, the blood and the burials. To be sure, I speak of these hardships far more from sympathy than from experience, so much above the common lot of the long dust-choked column was that of our small band of scouts. After July our brigade operated mainly in the region of the Big Black, endeavoring, with others, to make the enemy confine his overflow meetings to the Vicksburg side of that unlovely stream. How busy our small troop was kept; and what fame we won! On a certain day we came out of a dried swamp in column and ambled half across a field to see if a brigade going by us at right angles in the shade of a wood at the field's edge might be ours. It was not, though they were Confederates; but one of its captains was sent out toward us with a squadron to see who we might be, in our puzzling uniform, and when, midway, he made us out and called back to his commander, "Ferry's scouts!" the whole column cheered us. I feel the thrill of it to this hour. The curious one shrugged his shoulders. Then a loud clear voice rang to the roof, the voice of a woman who declared that she could prove it. A ripple of amazement followed. Before it died away Hetty became conscious of the fact that the voice was hers, and that she had spoken. Leona was silent. Whence the gems came was no business of her opponent. He seemed to be pleased about something. And he made no allusion to his money, which was a very bad sign. The Countess brought up the subject. "Visé? Do you mean to say, sir, that the whole of Visé has been set on fire?" Sandy wished his chum would be more careful. CHAPTER XV A TRAP IS BAITED It threw no beam, only a sort of dull phosphorescence; but Dick’s quick eyes ran instantly to its source—some small flashlamp covered with colored cloth, a handkerchief, perhaps. "But if they are," Willis said, "the man in the street is going to lose a lot of other things—things dependent on our shipments." "Well, why shud f?ather git shut of the best drover he ever had on his farm, if it ?un't——" Sometimes he would talk to her of the strange voyages he had made—how he had lived on ships ever since he was a boy of twelve, and had seen nearly the whole world, from the fiery steaming forests of Equador to the Northern Lights that make a mock day in Spitzbergen. He told her strange tales of wooded atolls in the South Seas, painting a fairyland she had scarcely dreamed, of palms motionless in the aromatic air, of pink and white shores, and lagoons full of fish all winged and frilled and iridescent—of the sudden swift sunrises and sunsets between Cancer and Capricorn, of the great ice-wall in the south, below Tasmania, which he had longed to penetrate, for who knew what lay beyond it in the Unknown? "And there's another like it what I've seen from Franz Josef Land—maybe there's countries beyond it, with gold." Then he told her of the terrible storms south of the Horn, of the uncharted Nelson Strait—of northern Baffin Land, where he had once gone on a whaler, of Rio Grande and the buried city of Tenoctitlan—"where there's gold." Gold seemed to be hidden in large quantities all over the world according to Dansay, and Caro once asked him why he had never brought any back. "Because I love what's better than[Pg 349] gold," he answered, and drew her, happy and quivering, into his arms. "Ye are the first, my friends," said Turner, cordially grasping the extended hand of Leicester, "and, by St. Nicholas! it is now getting fast on for ten o'clock." HoME免费一级无遮挡码大片儿
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