Nine men in ten whom you meet after a battle inquire the way to some fraction of the army—­as if any one could know.  Doubtless this officer was lost.  After resting himself a moment he would presumably follow one of the retiring burial squads.

When all were gone he walked straight away into the forest toward the red west, its light staining his face like blood.  The air of confidence with which he now strode along showed that he was on familiar ground; he had recovered his bearings.  The dead on his right and on his left were unregarded as he passed.  An occasional low moan from some sorely-stricken wretch whom the relief-parties had not reached, and who would have to pass a comfortless night beneath the stars with his thirst to keep him company, was equally unheeded.  What, indeed, could the officer have done, being no surgeon and having no water?

At the head of a shallow ravine, a mere depression of the ground, lay a small group of bodies.  He saw, and swerving suddenly from his course walked rapidly toward them.  Scanning each one sharply as he passed, he stopped at last above one which lay at a slight remove from the others, near a clump of small trees.  He looked at it narrowly.  It seemed to stir.  He stooped and laid his hand upon its face.  It screamed.

* * * * *

The officer was Captain Downing Madwell, of a Massachusetts regiment of infantry, a daring and intelligent soldier, an honorable man.

In the regiment were two brothers named Halcrow—­Caffal and Creede Halcrow.  Caffal Halcrow was a sergeant in Captain Madwell’s company, and these two men, the sergeant and the captain, were devoted friends.  In so far as disparity of rank, difference in duties and considerations of military discipline would permit they were commonly together.  They had, indeed, grown up together from childhood.  A habit of the heart is not easily broken off.  Caffal Halcrow had nothing military in his taste nor disposition, but the thought of separation from his friend was disagreeable; he enlisted in the company in which Madwell was second-lieutenant.  Each had taken two steps upward in rank, but between the highest non-commissioned and the lowest commissioned officer the gulf is deep and wide and the old relation was maintained with difficulty and a difference.

Creede Halcrow, the brother of Caffal, was the major of the regiment—­a cynical, saturnine man, between whom and Captain Madwell there was a natural antipathy which circumstances had nourished and strengthened to an active animosity.  But for the restraining influence of their mutual relation to Caffal these two patriots would doubtless have endeavored to deprive their country of each other’s services.