The flame was long in catching. Every eye was alternately peeping to the front and looking anxiously at the brush heap. At last she caught, and a thin column of black smoke began to ascend.
"Be sharp, now! Them rebs will want to know what we're up to."
A few curious heads could be seen, but no shot was fired at us, or by us at them.
The smoke increased, but, alas! the wind was wrong and blew it away from the woods.
"Hell and Tom Walker!" says Willis.
But heaven--which he had not appealed to--had decreed that Fort Willis should be evacuated under her own auspices. Our attention had been so fixed upon two important specks that the rest of the universe had become a trivial matter. A sudden clap of thunder almost overhead startled the defenders of the redoubt. Without our knowledge a storm had rolled up from the Atlantic; the rain was beginning to fall in big icy-cold drops, already obscuring our vision.
"Fire!" shouted Willis.
The tempest burst in fury, and the gang marched bravely back to the skirmish-line, amidst a hail, not of bullets, but of nature's making.