Motion Picture Story Magazine (Feb-Jul 1913)

70 TEE MOTION PICTURE STORY MAGAZINE thru the lattice-work of flakes, discerned sentries in sycamore stumps and ambushes lying in wait behind harmless boulders. The woods began to thin out, fading into cotton-fields, with a low log cabin here and there. I Then, on the hill before him, the Chase mansion loomed, white against the pallor of the sky. He tied his horse to a hidden sycamore. Then, a gray shadow sliding thru the other shadows, he crept across the lawn to the casement windows. He peered in — firelight twinkling on the haughty mahogany and Chippendale — an empty room. He entered and stood listening. Footsteps! Dropping to his knees, he crouched beneath the piano. A yellow girl,, important with jingling key-ring and long taper, came in, humming softly "Dem Golden Slippers. ' ' He heard her move about the room, lighting the candles; then a swish of skirts that drove the blood to his heart — Marion ! "You may go, Delphine " The dear, familiar, golden voice of her ! She wandered aimlessly to the piano, fingers fluttering to the keys. Suddenly he felt her grow tense — a quick breath! She had snatched something from the mantle-shelf and was stooping down to his hidingplace "Come out or I shall shoot " I must see her Come, then, dear — softly The revolver fell from her relaxed fingers as she swayed forward and into her husband's hungry arms. "James — James — James!" She could not say it enough, smothered against his cheek, his hot lips on her hair, her eyes, her throat. Then swift anxiety tore the joy from her face. She drew back, looking at his gray uniform. "But — if they find you — oh, James, you must go, dear. I am frightened ! ' ' He caught her arm, impatient of her fear. "Betty?" he gasped. "What of her? — they said " "Almost well, thank God." He breathed deeply, as tho he had not taken air into his lungs during all the long, terror-spurred ride. The bedroom was lustrous with the peace of candlelight. A familiar wrapper of his wife, a silken thing with lace-falls at neck and sleeve, hung over a chair; the even breathing of the child, asleep in the trundle bed, cheeks pink-creased like a slumbering rose, purred thru the silence. The home-gentleness of it all crept to the soldier's heart achingly. Arm about his Wife, he knelt by the little girl in parent-adoration. "Marion, where are you, Marion? John is here with some brother officers!" "Father!" she gasped. Her whisper, the mere shadow of a sound, reached him. "You must go — out of the window — quickly, dear " He caught her to him in a last swift, stifled embrace. "Marion!" "Yes, yes, father, I'm coming" — she tore herself away frantically. "Go, go — sweetheart — and God keep you " One more kiss burning on her lips with the meaning of all that he could not wait to say, and he was gone. On the veranda before the house lounged Lieutenant Chase and his friends, playing jack-straw and joking feebly to ease the waiting. A thud — a swift gray figure crouching thru the snow. "After him, boys!" James Adams ran with the desperation of a hunted fox hearing the hounds behind. The Confederates' position cut him from his horse; he must throw them off the scent somehow. Thru the underbrush he plunged, the briar and swinging creeper-vines whipping his face into bloody welts. Panting along the bluff sheer above the creek bottom, he glanced behind. They were very near now ; he could hear the rasp of their breath in laboring lungs. On the edge of the cliff he paused, dropped to his knees and swung, pendulum-like, in the unsupporting air. His fingers clawed for support while he tested the blank Avail with desperate boot-toes,