A country-road wandered along beside where the railroad had been, so Tom's progress was easy. Its bridges, too, had gone up in smoke, but the little streams were shallow and could be forded without difficulty, for June had been rainless and hot that year. The few houses the boy passed were shut-up and deserted. The fear of Morgan had swept the countryside bare of man, woman, and child. The solitude, the unnatural solitude of a region normally full of human life, told on Tom's nerves. He longed to see a human being. He had now left the gap in the railroad well behind, but he was still in an Eden without an Adam or an Eve. So, as dusk came, he rejoiced to see the gleam of a candle in a farmhouse not far ahead. He was so sure Morgan's whole command was by this time far to the northward that he galloped gayly up to the house--and, perforce, presented to the Confederacy one of the best horses seized in the entire raid. The gleam had come from a back window. The whole front of the house was closed, but that is common in rustic places and Tom was sure he would find the family in the kitchen, with both food and news to give him. Instead he found just outside the kitchen, as he and the big bay turned the corner, a group of dismounted cavalrymen in Confederate gray. A mounted officer was beside them. Two mounted men, one carrying a guidon, was nearby. Tom pulled hard on his right rein, to turn and run, and bent close to his saddle to escape the bullets he expected. But one of the men was already clutching the left rein. The horse reared and plunged and kicked. The rider, to his infinite disgust, was hurled from the saddle and landed on his hands and knees before the group. It was rather an abject position in which to be captured. The Southerners roared with good-humored laughter as they picked him up. Even the officer smiled at the boy's plight. Before the men, on a table outside the kitchen door, lay a half-dozen appetizing apple pies, evidently of that day's baking. The farmer's wife, before she fled, had put them there with the hope that they might propitiate the raiders, if they came, and so might save the house from destruction. She did not know that Morgan's men did not make war that way. Those of them who had come there suspected a trap in this open offer of the pies. "They mout be pizened," one trooper suggested. At that moment, when they were hesitating between hunger and fear, Tom butted in upon them and was seized. "Let the Yankee sample the pies," shouted a second soldier when the little scurry of the capture was over. This met instant approval and Tom, now upon his feet, was being pushed forward to the table when the officer spoke, with a smiling dignity that showed he was the friend as well as the commander of his rude soldiery. "I'll do the sampling," he said. "Give me a pie."