IV. — MOHUN AND HIS PRISONER.
Half an hour afterward, the storm had spent its fury, and I was standing by a bivouac fire on the banks of the Rappahannock, conversing with the officer against whom I had driven my horse in the darkness.
Mounted upon a powerful gray, he had led the attack with a sort of fury, and I now looked at him with some curiosity.
He was a man of about thirty, of gaunt face and figure, wearing a hat with a black feather, and the uniform of a colonel of cavalry. The features were regular and might have been called handsome; the eyes, hair, mustache, and imperial—he wore no beard—coal black; the complexion so pale that the effect was startling. More curious than all else, however, was the officer’s expression. In the lips and eyes could be read something bitterly cynical, mingled with a profound and apparently ineradicable melancholy. After looking at my new acquaintance for an instant, I said to myself: “This man has either suffered some great grief, or committed some great crime.”
His bearing was cold, but courteous.
“I recognized you as soon as I saw you, colonel,” he said, in response to my salute. “You probably do not know me, however, as I have just been transferred from the Army of the West. Colonel Mohun, at your service.”
I exchanged a pressure of the hand with Colonel Mohun, or, speaking more correctly, I grasped his. It did not return the pressure. I then thanked him for his timely appearance, and he bowed coldly.
“It was lucky that my scout led me in this direction,” he said, “that party is whipped back over the river, and will give us no more trouble to-night—the woods are full of their dead and wounded.”