What is Jones to me?  My mind confesses defeat and struggles none the less.  Could he be a brother?  Can it be possible, after all, that my name is B. Jones?  Anything seems possible.  Yet a thought shows me that this supposition is untenable.  If I am Berwick Jones, and the spy was my brother, I should have heard of him long ago.

Why? why should I hear of him, when I could not hear of myself?  The Confederate army may have had a score of spies named Jones, and I had never heard of one of them.

But if he had been my brother, he would have hunted me, and would have found me!  That was it.

This thought was more reasonable—­but ... he might have been killed!

He must have been killed by the shell on the hill ... yes ... that is why I can trace him no farther.  I have never seen him since.  Why had I at first assumed that he had been wounded only?  I see that I assumed too much—­or too little.  I had seen him under the fire, and had seen him no more; that was all.

Yet I knew absolutely and strangely that Jones had not been killed.

It is certain that the memory, in retracing a succession of events, does not voluntarily take the back track; it goes over the ground again, just as the events succeeded, from antecedent to consequent, rather than backward.  It is more difficult—­leaving memory aside—­to take present conditions and discover the unknown which evolved these conditions, than to take present conditions and show what will be evolved from them.  Of course, if we already know what preceded these conditions, there is no discovery to be claimed—­and that is what I am saying:  that with our knowledge of the present, the future is not a discovery; it is a mere development naturally augured from the present.  An incapable general means defeat, but defeat does not imply an incapable general.

Now, I had been trying to begin with Jones on the bare hill where I had seen him latest, and to go back, but my efforts had only proved the truth of the foregoing.  I had only jumped back a considerable distance, and from the past had followed Jones forward as well as my imperfect powers permitted; again I had jumped back and had followed him until he met the Doctor in the night.  The episode of lifting Willis into the ambulance seemed a separate event of very short duration.  My mind had unconsciously appreciated the difficulty of working backward, and had in reality endeavoured to avoid that almost impossible process by dividing Jones into several periods and following the events of each period in order of time and succession.  I now, without having willed to think it, became conscious of this difficulty, and I yielded at once to suggestion.  I would begin anew, and would help the natural process.

First I tried to sum up results.  I found these:  first, Jones, in blue, helps another man in blue and I follow him until I lose him when he reaches the Doctor.  Second, Jones, in blue, and the Doctor come to Willis again—­and then I lose Jones and all of them.  Third, Jones—­alone and in gray—­is in the act of falling, with a shell bursting over him, and I lose him.