The heat, the smoke, the thunder of the battle were over, and the fields of Gettysburg, where the terrible three days' fight had been, were drenched with human blood and covered with the dead and dying. The contest had been fearful, and its results carried sorrow and anguish to many a heart waiting for tidings from the war, and looking so anxiously for the names of the loved ones who, on the anniversary of the day which saw our nation's independence, lay upon the hills and plains of Gettysburg, their white faces upturned to the summer sky, and wet with the raindrops which like tears for the noble dead the pitying clouds had shed upon them. And nowhere, perhaps, was there a whiter face or a more anxious heart than at the farmhouse, where both Helen and her mother-in-law were spending the hot July days. Since the Christmas Eve when Helen had watched her husband going from her across the wintry snow, he had not been back, though several times he had made arrangements to do so. Something, however, had always happened to prevent. Once it was sickness which kept him in bed for a week or more; again his regiment was ordered to advance, and the third time it was sent on with others to repel the invaders from Pennsylvania soil. Bravely through each disappointment Helen bore herself, but her cheek always grew paler and her eye darker in its hue when the evening papers came, and she read what progress our soldiers had made, feeling that a battle was inevitable, and praying so earnestly that Mark Ray might be spared. Then when the battle was over, and up the Northern hills came the dreadful story of thousands and thousands slain, there was a fearful look in her eyes, and her features were rigid as marble, while the quivering lips could scarcely pray for the great fear tugging at her heart. Mark Ray was not with his men when they came from that terrific onslaught. A dozen had seen him fall, struck down by a rebel ball, and that was all she heard for more than a week, when there came another relay of news.
Captain Mark Ray was a prisoner of war, with several of his own company. An inmate of Libby Prison and a sharer from choice of the apartment where his men were confined. As an officer, he was entitled to better quarters than the filthy pen where the poor privates were, but Mark Ray had a large, warm heart, and he would not desert those who had been so faithful to him, and so he took their fare, and by his genial humor and unwavering cheerfulness kept many a heart from fainting and made the prisoners' life more bearable than it could have been without him. To young Tom Tubbs, who had enlisted six months before, he was a ministering angel, and many times the poor, homesick boy crept to the side of his captain, and laying his burning head in his lap, wept himself to sleep and dreamed he was at home again. The horrors of that prison life have never been told, but Mark bore up manfully, suffering less in mind, perhaps, than did the friends at home, who lived, as it were, a thousand years in that one brief summer while he languished in that horrid den whose very name had a power to send a thrill of fear to every heart.