The valley in which the camp lay was green and beautiful, and a deep, clear little river from the mountains, ran rushing, through it. The three lads lay on their blankets near the bank and listened to the musical sweep of the stream. Pennington suddenly sprang up and hailed:
“Hey, Ohio, is that you? Come here!”
A tall youth emerged from the dusk and looked at them inquiringly.
“Ohio,” said Pennington, “don't you remember your friends?”
The long, lean lad looked again, and then he was enthusiastically shaking hands with each in turn.
“Remember you!” he exclaimed. “Of course I do. If it hadn't been so dark I'd have seen you and called to you first. I'm glad you're alive. It's a lot to live in these times. I tried to find out about you fellows but couldn't. We came in a detachment ahead of you. But if you'll invite me, I'll stay awhile with you and talk.”
They offered him a blanket and he stretched out upon it, turning his eyes up to the sky, in which the stars were now coming.
“What are you thinking about, Ohio?” asked Dick.
“I'm thinking how fast I'm growing old. Two years and a half in the war, but it's twenty-five years in fact. I hadn't finished school when I left home and here I am, a veteran of more battles than any soldiers have fought since the days of old Bonaparte. If I happen to live through this war, which I mean to do, I wonder how I'll ever settle down at home again. Father will say to me: 'Get the plough and break up the five-acre field for corn,' and me, maybe a veteran of a dozen pitched battles in every one of which anywhere from one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand men have been engaged, not to mention fifty or a hundred smaller battles and four or five hundred skirmishes.
“When the flies begin to buzz around me I'll think they make a mighty poor noise compared with the roar of three or four hundred big cannon and a hundred thousand rifles that I've listened to so often. If a yellow jacket should sting me, I'd say what a little thing it is, compared with the piece of shrapnel that hit me at some battle not yet fought. Maybe I'd find things so quiet I just couldn't stand it. Wars are mighty unsettling.”