For this was what they called him--“_Poor Baby Bunting!_” They were a small reconnoitering party of his own comrades, and it was with a hearty good will that they pursued Jack Bixby who fled, as from his enemies, through the brush. Perhaps his enemies would have been gentler with him than his quondam friends could they only have laid hands on him, for they all loved “Baby Bunting” for his brave spirit and his little simplicities and his hearty good-comradeship. Hilary recognized none of them. He only had a vague idea of Captain Bertley’s face with a grave anxiety and a deep pity upon it as the officer gazed down at him when he was borne past on the stretcher to the field hospital where his right arm was taken off by the surgeon. He was treated as kindly as possible, for the remembrance of his gallant spirit as well as humanity’s sake, and when at last he was discharged from the more permanent hospital to which he had been removed he realized that he had indeed done with war and fine deeds of valiance, and he set out to return home, tramping the weary way to the mountain and his mother. After that fateful day, when maimed and wan and woebegone he came forth from the hospital and journeyed out from among the camps and flags and big guns and all the armaments of war, thrice splendid to his backward gaze, it seemed to him that he had left there more than was visible--that noble identity of valor for which he had revered himself. For he found as he went a strange quaking in his heart. It was an alien thing, and he strove to repudiate it, and ached with helpless despair. When he came into unfamiliar regions, and a sudden clatter upon the lonely country road would herald the approach of mounted strangers, halting him, the convulsive start of his maimed right arm with the instinct to seize his weapons and the sense of being defenseless utterly would so unnerve him that he would give a disjointed account of himself, with hang-dog look and faltering words. And more than once he was seized and roughly handled and dragged to headquarters to show his papers and be at last passed on by the authorities. He began to say to himself that his courage was in his cavalry pistol. “Before God!” he cried, “me an’ my right arm an’ my weepon air like saltpetre an’ charcoal an’ sulphur--no ’count apart. An’ tergether they mean _gunpowder_!” And doubly bereaved, he had come in sight of home. But his mother fell upon his neck with joy, and the neighbors gathered to meet him. The splendors of the Indian summer were deepening upon the mountains, with gorgeous fantasies of color, with errant winds harping æolian numbers in the pines, with a translucent purple haze and a great red sun, and the hunter’s moon, most luminous. The solemnity and peace stole in upon his heart, and revived within him that cherished sense of home, so potent with the mountaineer, and in some wise he was consoled.