“Not alone for that,” she said, “but for that also ... Oh, my father—my father!” From the street outside the garden wall came a sound of marching feet. Above the ivy showed, passing, the bayonet points. It was sunset and the west was crimson. Swallows circled above the house and the gold cups of the tulip tree. The marching feet went on, and the gleaming bayonet points. There came a flag, half visible above the ivy, silken, powder-darkened, battle-scarred. Cleave raised his hand in salute. The flag went by, the sound of the marching feet continued. High in the tree, against the rosy sky, a bird with a lyric throat began to sing, piercing sweet and clear. “Judith,” said Cleave, “before I go, there is a thing I want to tell you. Two days ago I was riding by A.P. Hill’s lines. There was a marshy place, on the edge of which the men were raising a breastwork. Judith, I am certain that I saw Stafford. He has done as I did—done what was and is the simple, the natural thing to do. Whether under his own name or another, he is there, heaping breastworks as a private soldier.” “He could not do as you did! You went clear and clean, and he—” “I do not know that there is ever any sharp line of difference. It is a matter of degree. I have come,” said Cleave simply, “to understand myself less and other people more. I did not show that I recognized him, for I could not tell if he would wish it ... I thought that you should know. It is not a time now for enmities.” “God knows that that is true,” said Judith, weeping. CHAPTER XXIX LITTLE PUMPKIN-VINE CREEK The log cabin looked out upon a wooded world, a world that rolled and shimmered, gold-green, blue-green, violet-green, to horizons of bright summer sky. In the distance, veiled with light, sprang Lost Mountain and the cone of Kennesaw. Far or near there were hamlets—Powder Spring, Burnt Hickory, Roxanna—north, there was the village of Allatoona, and south, that of Dallas; but from the log cabin all were sunk in a sea of emerald. New Hope Church was somewhere near, but its opening, too, was hardly more than guessed at. But Pumpkin-Vine Creek might be seen in its meanderings, and the rippling daughter stream that the soldiers called “Little Pumpkin-Vine” flashed by the hill on which stood the cabin. It was a one-room-and-a-lean-to, broken-down, deserted, log-and-clay thing. Whoever had lived in it had flown, leaving ashes on the hearth, and a hop-vine flowering over a tiny porch. A monster pine tree, scaled like a serpent, sent its brown shaft a hundred feet in air. Upon the sandy hilltop grew pennyroyal. Pine and pennyroyal, the intense sunshine drew out their strength. All the air was dryness and warmth and a pleasant odour.