“Yes. At the head of his men in a great charge. But the brigade is by the Rapidan.” “It was not the brigade I was thinking of,” said the other. He sat for a moment with his hand shading his eyes, then he slowly tore into pieces the letter to Warwick Cary. The remaining two letters he saw placed in the mail-bag for army headquarters. The next morning early he rode out of Winchester, out upon the Valley Pike. Before him lay Kernstown; beyond Kernstown stretched beneath the September mist the long, great war-road with its thronging memories. He touched his horse and for several days travelled southward through the blackened Valley of Virginia. CHAPTER XVIII THREE OAKS The countryside lay warm and mellow in the early autumn air. The mountains hung like clouds; the vales cherished the amber light. The maple leaves were turning; out on the edge of climbing fields the sumach was growing scarlet, the gum trees red as blood. The sunlight was as fine as old Canary. _Caw! Caw!_ went the crows, wheeling above the unplanted fields. The Three Oaks’ carriage, Tullius driving, climbed the heavy fields, where, nowadays, the roads were never mended. This region, the head of the great main Valley, was a high, withdrawn one. From it men enough had gone to war, but as yet it had not itself become a field for contending armies. No cannon here had roused the echoes of the Blue Ridge, no smoke of musketry drifted through the forest glades. News of the war came by boat up the James, or from the lower towns,—Lexington, Staunton, Charlottesville,—in the old, red, high-swung stages, or brought by occasional horsemen, in saddle-bags filled with newspapers. The outward change in the countryside was to be laid to the door, not of violent commission but of omission—omission less spectacular, but no less assured of results. The roads, as has been said, were untended, fallen into holes, difficult to travel. A scrub of sassafras, of trailing berry-vines, of mullein, was drawing with slender fingers many a field back into the wild. The fences were broken, gaps here and gaps there, trailed over by reddening vines. When the road passed a farmhouse the fences there were a ghastly, speckled, greyish white; innocent of whitewash for now going on three years. The horseblocks showed the same neglect; the spring-houses, too, and the outbuildings and negro cabins. The frame farmhouses looked as dolefully. The brick houses kept more an air of old times, but about these and their gardens there dwelled, too, a melancholy shabbiness. Everywhere was a strange feeling of a desert, of people gone away or sunken in dreams, of stopped clock-hands, of lowered life, of life holding itself very still, yet of a life that knew heavy and painful heartbeats. There were not many cattle in the fields; you