It was a little over two weeks or, perhaps, three, after the Confederate armies had laid down their arms and disbanded, and the rest of the men from the county had turned their faces homeward with, or without, their paroles in their pockets, that a train which had been crawling all night over the shaky track, stopped in the morning near the little station, or what remained of it, on the edge of the county, where persons bound for nearly all that region got off. A passenger was helped down by the conductor and brakeman and was laid, with his crutch and blanket, as gently as might be, on a bank a little way from the track. “Are you all right now? Do you think you can get on? You are sure someone will come for you?” asked the train men. “Oh! yes; I feel better already.” And the young fellow stretched out his hands in the gray dawn and felt the moist earth on either side of him almost tenderly. As the railroad men climbed back into the car they were conversing together in low tones. “Unless his friends come before many hours they won’t find him,” said one of them. “I don’t know but what we ought to a’ brought him along, any way.” But Jacquelin Gray had more staying power than they gave him credit for, and the very touch of the soil he loved did him good. He dragged himself a little way up, stretched himself out under a tree on the grass near where they had laid him, and went to sleep like a baby. The sun came up over the dewy trees and warmed him, and he only turned and slept on, dreaming that he had escaped from prison and reached the old county too weary to go any farther, and so, lay down on a bank and waited for someone to come for him. How often he had dreamed that, and had awaked to find himself in his old cot in the hospital, maybe, with the guard peering down at him with his lantern. Suddenly a shadow fell across his face, and he woke and looked up. Yes, there was the guard, three or four of them, gazing down on him in their blue uniform. “Jacquelin Gray. No.—. Ward ten,” he muttered wearily, as he used to do in the hospital, and was closing his eyes again when he awaked fully. Two or three Federal soldiers, one of them an officer, a little fellow with blue eyes, were leaning over him, and a cavalry company was yonder at rest, in the road below him. He was free after all, back in the old county. The Lieutenant asked him his name and how he came there, and he told them. “Where are you going?” “Home!” with a little flash in his eye. “Where is that?” “Above here, across the country, in the Red Rock neighborhood—beyond Brutusville.” “Why, we are going that way ourselves—we were going to give you a decent burial; but maybe we can do you a better turn if you are not ready for immortality; we’ve an ambulance along, and here’s the best substitute for the honor we offered you.” The little Lieutenant was so cheery as he pressed the canteen to Jacquelin’s lips that the latter could not help feeling better.