"We'll take you out o' that grass a-hopping, you long-legged rascals!" shouts Pointer, as the command is given:
"Deploy to right and left as skirmishers,"—while a battery of artillery is brought up at a gallop, and the guns are trained on a certain red barn away across the field, from which the enemy's sharpshooters are picking off our men.
Bang! Hur-r-r! Boom! One, two, three, four shells go crashing through the red barn, while the shingles and boards fly like feathers, and the sharpshooters pour out from it in wild haste. The pickets are popping away at one another out there along the field and in the edge of the wood beyond; the enemy is driven in and retreats, but we do not advance, and the expected battle does not come off after all, as we had hoped it would. For in the great war-council held about that time, as we afterwards learned, our generals, by a close vote, have decided not to risk a general engagement, but to let the enemy get back into Virginia again, crippled, indeed, but not crushed, as every man in the ranks believes he well might be.
As we step on the swaying pontoons to recross the Potomac into old Virginia, there are murmurs of disappointment all along the line.
"Why didn't they let us fight? We could have thrashed them now, if ever we could. We are tired of this everlasting marching and countermarching up and down, and we want to fight it out and be done with it."
But for all our feelings and wishes, we are back again on the south side of the river, and the column of blue soon is marching along gayly enough among the hills and pleasant fields about Waterford.
We did not go very fast nor very far those hot July days, because we had very little to eat. Somehow or other our provision trains had lost their reckoning, and in consequence we were left to subsist as best we could. We were a worn, haggard-looking, hungry, ragged set of men. As for me—out at knee and elbow, my hair sticking out in tufts through holes in the top of my hat, my shoes in shreds, and my haversack empty—I must have presented a forlorn appearance indeed. Fortunately, however, blackberries were ripe and plentiful. All along the road and all through the fields, as we approached Warrenton, these delicious berries hung on the vines in great luscious clusters. Yet blackberries for supper and blackberries for breakfast give a man but little strength for marching under a July sun all day long. So Corporal Harter and I thought, as we sat one morning in a clover-field where we were resting for the day, busy boiling a chicken at our camp-fire.
"Where did you get that chicken, Corporal?" said I.
"Well, you see, Harry, I didn't steal her, and I didn't buy her, neither. Late last night, while we were crossing that creek, I heard some fellow say he had carried that old chicken all day since morning, and she was getting too heavy for him, and he was going to throw her into the creek; and so I said I'd take her, and I did, and carried her all night, and here she is now in the pan, sizzling away, Harry."
"I'm afraid, Corporal, this is a fowl trick."