“At Grafton, Virginia,” said Brune, pushing the ashes from his cigar with the little finger of the hand holding it, and without looking up.

“At Grafton, Virginia,” the captain repeated.  “One dark and stormy night a soldier who had just returned from a long, fatiguing march was put on guard over you.  He sat on a cracker box inside the car, near the door, his rifle loaded and the bayonet fixed.  You sat in a corner and his orders were to kill you if you attempted to rise.”

“But if I asked to rise he might call the corporal of the guard.”

“Yes.  As the long silent hours wore away the soldier yielded to the demands of nature:  he himself incurred the death penalty by sleeping at his post of duty.”

“You did.”

“What! you recognize me? you have known me all along?”

The captain had risen and was walking the floor of his tent, visibly excited.  His face was flushed, the gray eyes had lost the cold, pitiless look which they had shown when Brune had seen them over the pistol barrel; they had softened wonderfully.

“I knew you,” said the spy, with his customary tranquillity, “the moment you faced me, demanding my surrender.  In the circumstances it would have been hardly becoming in me to recall these matters.  I am perhaps a traitor, certainly a spy; but I should not wish to seem a suppliant.”

The captain had paused in his walk and was facing his prisoner.  There was a singular huskiness in his voice as he spoke again.

“Mr. Brune, whatever your conscience may permit you to be, you saved my life at what you must have believed the cost of your own.  Until I saw you yesterday when halted by my sentinel I believed you dead—­thought that you had suffered the fate which through my own crime you might easily have escaped.  You had only to step from the car and leave me to take your place before the firing-squad.  You had a divine compassion.  You pitied my fatigue.  You let me sleep, watched over me, and as the time drew near for the relief-guard to come and detect me in my crime, you gently waked me.  Ah, Brune, Brune, that was well done—­that was great—­that—­”

The captain’s voice failed him; the tears were running down his face and sparkled upon his beard and his breast.  Resuming his seat at the table, he buried his face in his arms and sobbed.  All else was silence.

Suddenly the clear warble of a bugle was heard sounding the “assembly.”  The captain started and raised his wet face from his arms; it had turned ghastly pale.  Outside, in the sunlight, were heard the stir of the men falling into line; the voices of the sergeants calling the roll; the tapping of the drummers as they braced their drums.  The captain spoke again: 

“I ought to have confessed my fault in order to relate the story of your magnanimity; it might have procured you a pardon.  A hundred times I resolved to do so, but shame prevented.  Besides, your sentence was just and righteous.  Well, Heaven forgive me!  I said nothing, and my regiment was soon afterward ordered to Tennessee and I never heard about you.”