Then he remembered. The white walls were those of the Dunkard church at
Antietam, around which the blue and the gray had piled their bodies in
masses. The vast battlefield ranged past him like a moving panorama,
and then he was merely looking at Pendleton lying there below, so still.
Dick was sensitive and his affections were strong. He loved his mother
with a remarkable devotion, and his friends were for all time. Highly
imaginative, he felt a powerful stirring of the heart, at his second
return to Pendleton since his departure for the war. Yet he was chilled
somewhat by the strange silence hanging over the little town that he
loved so well. It was night, it was true, but not even a dog barked at
his coming, and there was not the faintest trail of smoke across the sky.
A brilliant moon shone, and white stars unnumbered glittered and danced,
yet they showed no movement of man in the town below.
He shook off the feeling, believing that it was merely a sensitiveness
born of time and place, and rode straight for his mother's house.
Then he dismounted, tied his horse to one of the pines, and ran up the
walk to the front door, where he knocked softly at first, and then more
loudly.
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