"Pass Lieutenant Mason."

But despite the dark they stared at him very curiously, and when he
walked on toward the piazza one of them muttered to the other:

"I guess he must have overtook that fugitive he was chasin'."

Dick walked up the steps upon the piazza, where some one had lighted a
small lamp, near which stood Colonel Winchester and his staff.

"Here's Dick!" exclaimed Warner in a tone of great relief.

"And we thought we had lost him," said Colonel Winchester, gladness
showing in his voice. Then he added: "My God, Dick, what have you been
doing to yourself?"

"Yes, what kind of a transformation is this?" added a major. "You've
certainly come back with a face very different from the one with which
you left us!"

Dick turned fiery red. He suddenly became conscious that he had a left
ear of enormous size, purple and swollen, that his left eye was closing
fast, that the blood was dripping from cuts on either cheek, that the
blood had flowed down the middle of his forehead and had formed a little
stalactite on the end of his nose, that his chin had been gashed in five
places by a strong fist, and that he had contributed his share to the
bloodshed of the war.

"If I didn't know these were modern times," said Warner, "I'd say that