It was still dark when the steamer drew in to a wharf. Lights were moving about. There were three or four houses, a flag flapping sulkily in the wind, a train of cars and a puffing engine, a line of black bluffs against the sky. It was misty dawn when the train started south, and full sunrise when she stepped from the train with Mavering and saw a house with high porch on a hill; below, near a grove, the brigade hospital tents. The big, hurrying surgeon said: "Move him! Good God!--I beg your pardon--yes. It's run mighty low. It needs warming and coaxing. There's da--I beg your pardon--there's very little of either here. This is the first time in six weeks the army of the Potomac has had any luck, to my knowledge." He looked at Helen suddenly, dropped his gallantry, and continued, gravely: "As to the chances, since you ask me, I suspect there are complications. But as an alternative to nights as cold as this, I should say, do almost anything." A moment's silence, and he went on: "They lie around here, about five hundred to an acre, several acres of them. That's the trouble. However, I knew Captain Windham. I admired him--this is the tent. I hope you have everything you need. Give him brandy and milk. The train goes back about eight. Good-bye." The big surgeon hurried away. Mavering stepped in behind her, looked around, and said: "Exactly. The pirate's gone." Helen did not hear him. A pile of straw and some blankets, a black cloak, the white face against it, like one drowned and going seaward with a tide. She dropped on her knees and bent over it. "Will you get the things," she half whispered, looking around--"a stretcher and some men? Please take my purse and come back in time for the train." Mavering went out. In the way of descriptive adjectives he thought "fierce" was the word. She looked "fierce." "And," he reflected. "I dare say a man may turn out a domestic cat if he were half drowned and properly stroked and not too old. _Quien sabe?_ If the anchorite comes to, I'm gambling my gray hairs he's tamed. Gray hairs are distinctly a misfortune." Helen leaned close over. The "must" and "shall" that absorbed her seemed straining at her eyes and lips. She felt as if she were lifting a weight. "You _must_, Gard, you _must_ stay"--struggling to keep the white face from going down in the suck of an undertow, drawn under by some blind power that knew no measures of values or who loved and remembered and who forgot. Measure of values! Your bullet goes forth in a pointed manner, appears to be determined, purposeful, greatly in earnest, and buries itself in a sand-bank, or the brain of a scholar--all one to the bullet, all one to the rifleman who knows nothing of the matter, all one to the per cent. of averages, to the flowing laws and far-off events of the universe.