Yet General D. H. Hill somehow let drop from a pocket his copy of the order, and that copy really was picked up through sheer chance. * * * * * Dad read to the end; then hurriedly reread. Then he turned to Jimmie; his firm mouth twitching grotesquely. “This--this has got to get to General McClellan--now--_now_!” he babbled. “It means--Lord of Battles!--it means _everything_ to us! _Everything!_ It must go to him as fast as a horse can be flogged into running. And--my horse is dead beat; and so, I guess, is yours! Oh, _what’s_ to be done?” He strode nervously across to where the runaway still cropped grass, half-way down the slope of the farther hillock. And as he came within arm’s length of the animal a rather pleasant voice called to him from a thicket to the left: “Hands up, Yank! Hands up, _both_ of you. Up. ‘Way up!” CHAPTER XXVIII CHECK AND COUNTER-CHECK Dad wheeled. At the hillock’s foot, just in front of him, a bare ten feet away, stood a man in the frayed and stained gray uniform of a captain of Confederate cavalry. A path, running down the hill, wound through thick undergrowth beyond. And along this thicket-grown path, from somewhere in the rear of the Confederate army, the captain had evidently ridden. At sight of the two Northerners he must have dismounted; for his horse stood directly behind him within the high screen of bushes. So silently had the man approached, and so engrossed had Dad been in the mighty fate that hung on his own strangely acquired tidings, that no warning of the enemy’s approach had come to put him on his guard. And now the boy on the hillock crest and his grandfather near the hillock foot found themselves looking into the steadily leveled mouth of an army revolver. The Confederate eyed them with a slight smile of almost deprecatory politeness. “Hands up, I _said_,” he repeated. “Hands up, Jimmie!” called Dad cheerfully, over his shoulder. “He’s got the drop on us. And a loaded pistol is apt to be a nasty thing to argue with. It’s got a snappish way of insisting on having the last word.” He set his grandson the example by raising his own hands well above his head. Striding forward toward his captor, he smiled back into the Confederate’s smiling face and said: “What next, sir? We seem to be at your orders. Or, rather, at your pistol’s. What do you want of us?” “Why,” said the captain politely, his soft, slurring accent unruffled by the faintest trace of excitement, “I’m mighty sorry to discommode you, suh. But I’m afraid I’ll have to get you-all to walk ahead of me a half-mile or so along that path to where my company is resting for dinner. “After that I’m afraid it’ll be Libby for you, suh, and Belle Isle prison for your little orderly up yonder. Off’cers to the right; privates to the left. May I trouble you to stand still in that uncomfortable attitude just a minute longer, suh?”