you're going to get leave of absence to nurse a Johnny Reb."
"I might take it," said Roland.
"And be shot for desertion?"
"That's as may be. The chances are I shouldn't be missed till you were too far away to send back for me. I must go and answer to my name, and then see if I can't drop behind."
Ned held his head in his hands as if it would else burst with the folly of his friend's idea.
"You'll take care of the letter," he whispered.
"I can't stay here all day talking d nonsense," he said, angrily. "I'm off into camp."
He strode away, and Roland kept pace with him. He did not need his friend's assurance of the folly of the act he meditated. He quite recognised that, but it was only in the background of his thoughts, which were filled with the memory of a woman's face. How could he leave the man
Rose loved, to die, while any possible effort of his might suffice to save him?
The first flakes of the coming snowstorm fell as the detachment started. It marched in very loose order, for the road was rough, the snow deep, most of the men more or less broken with wounds and fatigue, and it was known that no enemy was within sixty miles. Roland fell, little by little, to the rear, where the clumsy country waggons lumbered along full of the wounded under Ned's charge.
"You'll take care of the letter," he whispered, and thrust it into his friend's hand. "Good-bye; I shall fall in with the next detachment if I pull through long enough. If not———"
He nodded, and at a sudden turn of the road, here thickly surrounded by maple and hemlock, darted among the trees, and listened, with his heart in his ears, to the jingle and clatter of arms as his comrades
