"Believing as I do in the right of the State first and the Union afterwards, I had hoped you might see it differently. But who, but God, controls the course of an honest mind? "Go, my son--I shall never see you again. But I know you, my son, and I shall die knowing you did what you thought was right." The young man wept when he read this--he was neither too old nor too hardened for tears--and when he rode away, from the ridge of the Mountain he looked down again--the last time, on all that had been his life's happiness. It was an hour afterwards when the old General called in his overseer. "Watts," he said, "in the accursed war which is about to wreck the South and which will eventually end in our going back into the Union as a subdued province and under the heel of our former slaves, there will be many changes. I, myself, will not live to see it. I have two grandsons, as you know, Tom and Richard. Richard is in Europe; he went there following Alice Westmore, and is going to stay, till this fight is over. Now, I have added a codicil to my will and I wish you to hear it." He took up a lengthy document and read the last codicil: "_Since the above will was written and acknowledged, leaving The Gaffs to be equally divided between my two grandsons, Thomas and Richard Travis, my country has been precipitated into the horrors of Civil War. In view of this I hereby change my will as above and give and bequeath The Gaffs to that one of my grandsons who shall fight--it matters not to me on which side--so that he fights. For The Gaffs shall never go to a Dominecker. If both fight and survive the war, it shall be divided equally between them as above expressed. If one be killed it shall go to the survivor. If both be killed it shall be sold and the money appropriated among those of my slaves who have been faithful to me to the end, one-fifth being set aside for my faithful overseer, Hillard Watts._" In the panel of the wall he opened a small secret drawer, zinc-lined, and put the will in it. "It shall remain there unchanged," he said, "and only you and I shall know where it is. If I die suddenly, let it remain until after the war, and then do as you think best." CHAPTER II THE REAL HEROES The real heroes of the war have not been decorated yet. They have not even been pensioned, for many of them lie in forgotten graves, and those who do not are not the kind to clamor for honors or emoluments. On the last Great Day, what a strange awakening for decorations there will be, if such be in store for the just and the brave: Private soldiers, blue and gray, arising from neglected graves with tattered clothes and unmarked brows. Scouts who rode, with stolid faces set, into Death's grim door and died knowing they went out unremembered. Spies, hung like common thieves at the end of a rope--hung, though the bravest of the brave.