And as he came within arm’s length of the animal a rather pleasant voice called to him from a thicket to the left:
“Hands up, Yank! Hands up, both of you. Up. ‘Way up!”
CHAPTER XXVIII
CHECK AND COUNTER-CHECK
DAD wheeled. At the hillock’s foot, just in front of him, a bare ten feet away, stood a man in the frayed and stained gray uniform of a captain of Confederate cavalry.
A path, running down the hill, wound through thick undergrowth beyond. And along this thicket-grown path, from somewhere in the rear of the Confederate army, the captain had evidently ridden.
At sight of the two Northerners he must have dismounted; for his horse stood directly behind him within the high screen of bushes.
So silently had the man approached, and so engrossed had Dad been in the mighty fate that hung on his own strangely acquired tidings, that no warning of the enemy’s approach had come to put him on his guard.
And now the boy on the hillock crest and his grandfather near the hillock foot found themselves looking into the steadily leveled mouth of an army revolver.
The Confederate eyed them with a slight smile of almost deprecatory politeness.
“Hands up, I said,” he repeated.