Hours passed under the black sky, into which the hissing, spluttering fire of green wood was too despondent to hurl a single spark. The men stood or squatted about the smoke-ringed pile on rails and fence-boards which they had laid to save them from the soft mud—in silence broken only by fitful words. From time to time the monotonous call of the sentries out in the darkness came to them like the hooting of an owl. Sharp shadows on the canvas walls of the captain’s tent and the sound of voices from within told them that the officers were playing poker. Once or twice some moody suggestion of a “game” fell upon the smoky air outside, but died away unanswered. It was too wet and muddy and generally depressing. The low west wind which had risen since nightfall carried the threat of more rain.
“Grant ain’t no good, nor any other dry-land general, in this dripping old swamp of a country,” growled a grizzled corporal, whose mud-laden heels had slipped off his rail. “The man we want here is Noah. This is his job, and nobody else’s.”
“There’d be one comfort in that, anyway,” said another, well read in the Bible. “When the rain was all over, he set up drinks.”
“Don’t you make any mistake,” put in a third. “He shut himself up in his tent, and played his booze solitaire. He didn’t even ask in the officers of the ark and propose a game.”
“I—I ‘ve got a small flask with me,” one of the recruits diffidently began. “I was able to get it to-day at Dinwiddie Court House. Paid more for it I suppose, than—”
In the friendly excitement created by the recruit’s announcement, and his production of a flat, brown bottle, further explanation was lost. Nobody cared how much he had paid. Two dozen of his neighbors took a lively interest in what he had bought. The flask made its tour of only a segment of the circle, amid a chorus of admonitions to drink fair, and came back flatter than ever and wholly empty. But its ameliorating effect became visible at once. One of the recruits was emboldened to tell a story he had heard at City Point, and the veterans consented to laugh at it. Conversation sprang up as the fire began to crackle under a shift of wind, and the newcomers disclosed that they all had clean blankets, and that several had an excess of chewing tobacco. At this last, all reserve was cleared away. Veterans and recruits spat into the fire now from a common ground of liking, and there was even some rivalry to secure such thoughtful strangers as tent-mates.
Only one of the newcomers stood alone in the muddiest spot of the circle, before a part of the fire which would not burn. He seemed to have no share in the confidences of his fellow-recruits. None of their stories or reminiscences referred to him, and neither they nor any veteran had offered him a word during the evening.
He was obviously an Irishman, and it was equally apparent that he had just landed. There was an indefinable something in the way he stood, in his manner of looking at people, in the very awkwardness with which his ill-fitting uniform hung upon him, which spoke loudly of recent importation. This in itself would have gone some way toward prejudicing Company F against him, for Castle Garden recruits were rarely popular, even in the newest regiments. But there was a much stronger reason for the cold shoulder turned upon him.
This young man who stood alone in the mud—he could hardly have got half through the twenties—had a repellent, low-browed face, covered with freckles and an irregular stubble of reddish beard, and a furtive squint in his pale, greenish-blue eyes. The whites of these eyes showed bloodshot, even in the false light of the fire, and the swollen lines about them spoke plainly of a prolonged carouse. They were not Puritans, these men of Company F, but with one accord they left Andrew Linsky—the name the roster gave him—to himself.
Time came, after the change of guard, when those who were entitled to sleep must think of bed. The orderly-sergeant strolled up to the fire, and dropped a saturnine hint to the effect that it would be best to sleep with one eye open; signs pointed to a battle next day, and the long roll might come before morning broke. Their brigade was on the right of a line into which two corps had been dumped during the day, and apparently this portended the hottest kind of a fight; moreover, it was said Sheridan was on the other side of the ridge. Everybody knew what that meant.