"Come in here, Brennus. Let's see your letter," called the sergeant, stepping warily forward, his gun, too, at the charge. And presently out from under the stars steps a tall negro boy, lithe, active, and alert. He is trembling a bit and uncertain of his whereabouts. He needs to know something before he can impart anything, and presently it comes. "Is you gen'lemen--Yankees?" "Yankees from the general down," answers the sergeant. "Half a dozen right here ready to hear your story." And the negro seems to recognize alien accent in the Western twang of the speaker, and to take heart at once. "Dey done gimme a paper," he whispers, and the general interrupts. "Bring him back to the reserve, where there's a fire. We'll examine him there, sergeant." And, turning his horse, the general leads the way. It is nearly eleven o'clock when, a little later, half a dozen officers are grouped about the slender, tattered, weary negro, a lad barely twenty years of age, if that. To the general he has handed a roll of tin-foil, on which, as it is unfolded by the gleam of the camp-lanterns, the word "Solace" is stamped, and the thin tissue-paper it encloses bears some writing, over which the general strains his eyes and studies eagerly; bends closer to the light and studies again. Then, straightening up suddenly, he turns upon the young negro. "Where'd you leave them? How far out?" "'Bout two miles, suh; p'r'aps not dat much." "Are you sure about the troops,--about the number? There are none others?" "Ye-as, suh. Dey ain't any udder companies near." "And you can guide us right to the spot?" "Ye-as, suh. Certain, suh." The general turns sharply on his senior aide. "There's not a moment to be lost. What a pity we have no cavalry! Ride straight to Colonel Connor. Tell him to rouse his regiment instantly and without a sound. Leave knapsacks and blankets in camp. Guide them here as quick as you can. Now, captain, this boy must have a rousing supper. He deserves it." CHAPTER XXIII. And now if there is a boy reader of this story who doesn't say it is high time he is told what had become of Snipe Lawton, then the narrator never knew a thing about boys. Leaving Shorty to sleep over his injured dignity and lose another of the opportunities of his life, we will turn back the page and look again over the stirring fields thirty miles to the south. As neither Snipe nor his major nor his friend Keating, of the Zouaves, had been recognized among the dead, as they were not apparently among the prisoners, and as they certainly had not reappeared among their comrades along the Potomac, they must be looked for where last seen, close to that old brick and stone Virginia homestead, bowered in the midst of vines and fruit-trees, known as the Henry house.