There followed, at once, a sound of bare feet from inside, and a gigantic, half-clad figure appeared anxiously at the door. It was the figure of a white man; and, as the lieutenant caught its shoulder, and threw his revolver muzzle to its broad chest, he found himself looking into the grave eyes of former Sergeant-Major Peter Spooner, late of the 26th Volunteers. For an instant, the officer stood too dazed to credit the testimony of his eyes, but, while the Deacon glanced down the barrel of Newt's leveled rifle, and shrugged his shoulders with a low oath, the officer realized that he had under his hand the mysterious renegade. And then, as the deserter, still gazing into the flinty face of his kinsman, raised his hands in surrender, he coolly turned toward the house, and shouted back in excellent Spanish: "General, we are captives. Resistance is useless." In answer to that message, there shortly appeared, framed in the door, the startled countenance of the notorious Rosario himself. Once too often, he had trusted himself with those inconsiderable escorts which had enabled him to pass from place to place without attracting attention. The detail made its march back to headquarters, taking its prisoners with it, in a semi-dazed condition. Against Rosario they felt little vindictiveness, now that he was captive to their arms. But this other, this sergeant-major who had organized most of them into soldiery back there in the Appalachian hills, with him there was a ghastly difference. He had been a hero, mourned as lost. He had taken the pay of the service and held its highest warrant--and he had been false to his salt, for those tin bars which they roughly stripped from his shoulders. But, if the command was struck sick with astonishment, Black Pete himself treated them to no show of emotion. He had already considered and weighed what it meant to desert to the enemy in time of war, and he had been taken in attendance upon the enemy's district leader, wearing the enemy's livery. He was already, in effect, dead, and he meant to maintain the stolid silence of death. And so the detachment marched into headquarters with the grim silence of a funeral cortège, though as yet the corpse walked upright and on its own feet. No lips were tighter set, and no face more stonily expressionless than that of Sergeant Newton Spooner. His was the capture, his the credit--and, in part, the shame. Between himself and the man who must hang existed the bond of one blood and one name. The smirch upon the regiment was likewise a smirch upon that blood and name.