This message had come but a few minutes before and it had been received with silent satisfaction for Grant knew now that Abraham Lincoln and he were in perfect accord as to the means for swiftly bringing on the end.  But the plans must be well laid and to that end he must leave City Point within a few hours and go north.  And so he was standing at a window of his headquarters this morning with his eyes resting unseeingly on the camp, while his cool, quiet mind steadily forged out his schemes.

Unlike the headquarters of “play” armies where all is noise and confusion and bloodied orderlies throw themselves off of plunging horses and gasp out their reports, the room in which General Grant did his work was strangely quiet.

It was a large, square room with high ceiling and wall paper which had defied all the arts of Europe to render interesting in design.  Furniture was neither plentiful nor comfortable—­a slippery, black horse-hair sofa, a few horse-hair chairs and, at one side of the room, a table and a desk, littered with papers, maps and files.  At the table Grant’s adjutant, Forbes, sat writing.  Facing him was the door opening out into the hallway of the house where two sentries stood on guard.  In the silence which pervaded the room and in the quiet application to the work in hand there was a perfect reflection of the mind of him who stood impassive at the window with his back turned, a faint blue cloud of cigar smoke rising above his head.

A quick step sounded in the corridor—­the step of one who bears a message.  An orderly appeared in the doorway, spoke to the two sentries and was passed in with a salute to Forbes.

“For General Grant,” he said, holding out a folded note of white paper.  “Personal from Lieutenant Harris, sir.”

At the sound of his name the General turned slowly and accepted the note which the orderly presented.  He took it without haste and yet without any perceptible loss of time or motion and, as always, without unnecessary words.  Scanning it, he shifted his cigar to one corner of his mouth where its smoke would not rise into his eyes, thought for an instant, then nodded shortly.

“I’ll see him.  At once.”

Dismissed, the orderly saluted and passed quickly out.  The General, with his chin in his collar and his cigar held between his fingers at nearly the same level, moved back to the window and stood there silently as before.  He knew what Lieutenant Harris would wish to speak to him about.  A few weeks before a Lieutenant-Colonel of cavalry had been court-martialed on the charge of allowing the escape of a spy.  The court had found him guilty and its findings had been submitted to the higher authorities and endorsed by them.  A copy of these reports now lay on his desk.  All this his Adjutant, Forbes, knew as well as the General himself, but if Forbes had thought it worth while to speculate on the extent of his commander’s interest he might have guessed for years without ever drawing one logical conclusion from all the hints that that impassive face and figure gave him.