The Southerner tried to speak his gratitude, but the words refused to
come; so he stretched one trembling hand toward his enemy of war, and
eased his heart in a sobbing, broken call:

"_Morrison! Some day it will all--be over!_"

* * * * *

In the cabin's doorway stood Virgie and her father, hand in hand. They
watched a lonely swallow as it dipped across the desolate, unfurrowed
field. They listened to the distant beat of many hoofs on the river road
and the far, faint clink of sabers on the riders' thighs; and when the
sounds were lost to the listeners at last, the notes of a bugle came
whispering back to them, floating, dipping, even as the swallow dipped
across the unfurrowed fields.

But still the two stood lingering in the doorway, hand in hand. The
muddy James took up his murmuring song again; the locusts chanted in the
hot, brown woods to the basso growl of the big, black guns far down the
river.

A sad, sad song it was; yet on its echoes seemed to ride a haunting,
hopeful memory of the rebel's broken call, "Some day it will all be
over!"

And so the guns growled on, slow, sullen, thundering forth the
battle-call of a still unconquered enmity; but only that peace might
walk "some day" in the path of the shrieking shells.