"
Mrs. Mason said nothing, but stared into the coals. The great negress,
Juliana, standing at the window, did not move.
"I suppose you are right, Dick," she said at last with a sigh, "but
it is awful that our people should be arrayed so against one another.
There is your cousin, Harry Kenton, a good boy, too, on the other side."
"Yes, mother, I caught a glimpse of him at Bull Run. We came almost
face to face in the smoke. But it was only for an instant. Then the
smoke rushed in between. I don't think anything serious has happened
to him."
Mrs. Mason shuddered.
"I should mourn him next to you," she said, "and my brother-in-law,
Colonel Kenton, has been very good. He left orders with his people to
watch over us here. Pendleton is strongly Southern as you know, but
nobody would do us any harm, unless it was the rough people from the
hills."
Colonel Kenton's wife had been Mrs. Mason's elder sister, and Dick,
as he also sat staring into the coals, wondered why people who were
united so closely should yet be divided so much.
"Mother," he said, "when I came through the mountains with my friends
we stopped at a house in which lived an old, old woman. She must have
been nearly a hundred. She knew your ancestor and mine, the famous and
learned Paul Cotter, from whom you and I are descended, and she also
knew his friend and comrade, the mighty scout and hunter, Henry Ware,
who became the great governor of Kentucky.
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