“I think I do. Men with rifles are in there. I'll speak to the colonel.”
He crawled to Colonel Winchester, who was crouched a dozen feet away, and pointed to the wood, or rather thicket of scrub. But Dick meanwhile saw increasing numbers of men there. They were beyond the line of battle and were not obscured by the clouds of smoke. As he stared he saw a weazened figure under an enormous, broad-brimmed hat, and, although he could not discern the face at the distance, he knew that it was Slade, come with a new and perhaps larger body of riflemen to burn away the extreme left flank of the Union force.
As the colonel and the sergeant crawled back Dick told them what he had seen, and they recognized at once the imminence of the danger. Colonel Winchester looked at the great columns of fire and smoke in front of him. He did not know when the main attack would sweep down upon them again, but he took his resolution at once.
He ordered his men to wheel about, and, using Slade's own tactics, to creep forward with their rifles. Most of his men were sharpshooters and he felt that they would be a match for those whom the guerrilla led. Sergeant Whitley kept by his side, and out of a vast experience in border warfare advised him.
Dick, Warner and Pennington armed themselves with rifles of the fallen, and they felt fierce thrills of joy as they crept forward. Burning with the battle fever, and enraged against this man Slade, Dick put all his soul in the man-hunt. He merely hoped that Victor Woodville was not there. He would fire willingly at any of the rest.
Before they had gone far Slade and his riflemen began to fire. Bullets pattered all about them, clipping twigs and leaves and striking sparks from stones.
Had the fire been unexpected it would have done deadly damage, but all of the Winchesters, as they liked to call themselves, had kept under cover, and were advancing Indian fashion. And now a consuming rage seized them all. They felt as if an advantage had been taken of them. While they were fighting a great battle in front a sly foe sought to ambush them. They did not hate the Southern army which charged directly upon them, but they did hate this band of sharpshooters which had come creeping through the woods to pick them off, and they hated them collectively and individually.
It was Dick's single and fierce desire at that moment to catch sight of Slade, whom he would shoot without hesitation if the chance came. He looked for him continually as he crept from bush to bush, and he withheld his fire until fortune might bring into his view the flaps of that enormous hat. The whole vast battle of Chickamauga passed from his mind. He was concentrated, heart and soul, upon this affair of outposts in the thickets.
Men around him were firing, and the bullets in return were knocking up the leaves about him, but Dick's finger did not yet press the trigger. The great hat was still hidden from view, but he heard Slade's whistle calling to his men. Sergeant Whitley was by the lad's side, and he glanced at him now and then. The wise sergeant read the youth's face, and he knew that he was upon a quest, a deadly one.
“Is it Slade you're looking for, Mr. Mason?” he asked.