For Keedon Bluffs had not always been so silent. They had echoed the clamors of artillery. Not that a battle was ever fought in these fastnesses, but once from a distant point the woods in the cove were shelled, and, ranging further than the bursting bombs, this solid round shot cleared the river at the mountain’s base, and dropped at last on the ledge, remaining the only memento of the day. Covered with rust, half draped by a vine, peaceful and motionless and mute, it lay. And Ike Guyther, looking at it, wished that he had lived in those times of riding and raiding, when the batteries roared their sulphurous thunder, and flung their shells, hurtling along these quiet woodland ways, with fuses all a-flaring. “Folks in them days hed a chance ter show thar grit, an’ ride, an’ fight, an’ fire off them big guns,” he grumbled, when he had gone back to his father’s cabin, in Tanglefoot Cove, three miles away, and had detailed his discovery to the fireside group. “They war mos’ly boys, no older sca’cely ’n me. An’ hyar _I_ be—_a-drivin’ up the cow_!” “Waal, now,” exclaimed his mother in her consolatory drawl, “ye oughter be powerful thankful ye hev got a cow ter drive. The gu’rillas made beef o’ yer aunt Jemimy’s cow.” “An’ fur goodness’ sake look at yer uncle Abner ef ye hanker so ter go a-fightin’,” his aunt Jemima tartly admonished him. There sat all day beside the wood-fire a man of middle age, but with a face strangely young. It was like the face of a faded painting, changing only in the loss of color. The hair, growing off a broad forehead, was bleaching fast; the tints had become dim on cheek and lip, but time and care had drawn no lines, and an expression of childlike tranquillity hovered about the downcast eyes, forever shielded by the drooping lids. Life seemed to have ended for him twenty years before, on a day surcharged with disaster, when the great gun, which had been a sort of Thor to him, and which he had served with an admiring affection and reverent care, was spiked by its own cannoneers that it might fall useless into the hands of the enemy. It was the last thing he ever saw—this great silenced god of thunder—as he stood beside it with the sponge-staff in his hand. For among the shells shrieking through the smoky air, one was laden with his doom. A hiss close at hand, the din of an abrupt explosion, and he fell unconscious under the carriage of the piece, and there he was captured. And when the war was over and he came forth alike from the prison and the hospital, blinded and helpless, naught remained to him but to vaguely ponder on what had been in the days that had gone forever, for he hardly seemed to look to the future, and the present was empty-handed.