"How do you do, Captain Bertrand?" he said--the man wore the uniform of a captain. Bertrand stared at Harry, and then he gradually remembered. It was not strange that he was puzzled at first, as in the two years that had passed since Bertrand was in Colonel Kenton's house at Pendleton, Harry had grown much larger and more powerful, and was deeply tanned by all kinds of weather. But when he did recall him his greeting was full of warmth. "Ah, now I know!" he exclaimed. "It is Harry Kenton, the son of Colonel George Kenton! And we held that meeting at your father's house on the eve of the war! And then we went up to Frankfort, and we did not take Kentucky out of the Union." "No, we didn't," said Harry with a laugh. "Captain Bertrand, Lieutenant St. Clair and Lieutenant Langdon." But Bertrand had known them both in Charleston, and he shook their hands with zeal and warmth, showing what Harry thought--as he had thought the first time he saw him--an excess of manner. "We've a fine big dry place under this tree," said St. Clair. "Let's sit down and talk. You're the new Captain in our regiment, are you not?" "Yes," replied Bertrand. "I've just come from Richmond, where I met my chief, that valiant man, Colonel Leonidas Talbot. I have been serving mostly on the coast of the Carolinas, and when I asked to be sent to the larger theater of war they very naturally assigned me to one of my own home regiments. Alas! there is plenty of room for me and many more in the ranks of the Invincibles." "We have been well shot up, that's true," said Langdon, whom nothing could depress more than a minute, "but we've put more than a million Yankees out of the running." "How are your Knights of the Golden Circle getting on?" asked Harry. Bertrand flushed a little, despite his swarthiness. "Not very well, I fear," he replied. "It has taken us longer to conquer the Yankees than we thought." "I don't see that we've begun to conquer them as a people or a section," said St. Clair, who was always frank and direct. "We've won big victories, but just look and you'll see 'em across the river there, stronger and more numerous than ever, and that, too, on the heels of the big defeat they sustained at Fredericksburg. And, if you'll pardon me, Captain, I don't believe much in the great slave empire that the Knights of the Golden Circle planned." Bertrand's black eyes flashed. "And why not?" he asked sharply. "To take Cuba and Mexico would mean other wars, and if we took them we'd have other kinds of people whom we'd have to hold in check with arms. A fine mess we'd make of it, and we haven't any right to jump on Cuba and Mexico, anyway. I've got a far better plan." "And what is that?" asked Bertrand, with an increasing sharpness of manner. "The North means to free our slaves. We'll defeat the North and show to her that she can't. Then we'll free 'em ourselves."