"Hello, Corporal," said Pete, with a capacious grin rifting the powder grime on his face. "We've just bin having lots o' fun."
"Pete, you aggravatin' little brat," said Shorty, giving him a cuff that started the boy's tears to making little white streaks through the black, "where in the world have you bin, and what've you bin doin'?"
"Why," whimpered Pete, "me and Sandy crept forward to a rock where we thought we could see better, and then we thought we could see better from another, and we kept a-goin' until we got clear up to where the limbers was, afore we knowed it. Just then a couple o' them powder-monkeys, as you call 'em, come runnin' back for cartridges, but they was both hit, and was all bloody, and both of 'em fell down and couldn't go no further, when they got the cartridges, though they wanted to. Me and Sandy thought it was too bad that the men up there at the guns shouldn't have no cartridges, when they was fighting so hard, so we picked up the boys' bags and run up to the cannon with 'em. The men there was so glad to git 'em, and told us to lay down our guns and run back for some more. They kept us goin' till the rebels was knocked out, and we thought we was doin' right and helpin', and they told us we was, and now you slap me. Boo-hoo-hoo!"
"Don't cry, Pete. I done wrong," said Shorty, melting instantly, and putting his arm around the boy. "You done right, and you're a brave, good little boy. Only you must not go away from the company without lettin' me know."
"Good God," groaned the Colonel, as he halted the regiment down the slope, and studied the opposite side with his glass. "There's another abatis, and it looks worse than the one in which we have just left half the regiment. But we'll go through if there's only one man left to carry the flag over the works. I don't suppose that we are any better than those who have already died, or got any better right to live."
"This is the dumbedest country for cuttin' down trees the wrong way," Si sadly remarked, as he surveyed the abatis. "It's meaner'n midnight murder. I'd like to git hold o' the pizen whelp what invented it."
"The devil invented abatis, just after he invented hell, and as an improvement on it, and just before he invented secession," Shorty judged hotly. "When we git through them abatis there I'm goin' to kill everything I find, just to learn 'em to stop sich heathenish work. It's sneakin' murder, not war."
"When we get through," murmured Alf Russell dolefully. "How many of us will ever get through?"
"Who'll be the Jim Humphreys and Gid Mackals this time?" said Monty Scruggs, looking at the tangled mass of tree-tops.
"Can you see any path through this abatis, Sergeant?" nervously asked Harry Joslyn.