But the army marched. After a brief breakfast the brigades moved down the road, and Harry saw clearly that these veterans of the valley were tremulous with excitement. Youthful, eager, and used to victory, they were anxious to be at the very center of affairs which were now on a gigantic scale. And the throbbing of the distant guns steadily drew them on.
“We'll get all we want before this is through,” said Dalton gravely to Harry.
“I think so, too. Listen to those big guns, George! And I think I can hear the crack of rifles, too. Our pickets and those of the enemy must be in contact in the forest there on our left.”
“I haven't a doubt of it, but if we rode that way like as not we'd strike first a swamp, or a creek twenty feet deep. I get all tangled up in this kind of a country.”
“So do I, but it doesn't make any difference. We just stick along with Old Jack.”
The army marched on a long time, always to the accompaniment of that sinister mutter in the southeast. Then they heard the note of a bugle in front of them and Jackson with his staff rode forward near a little church called Walnut Grove, where Lee and his staff sat on their horses waiting. Harry noticed with pride how all the members of Lee's staff crowded forward to see the renowned Jackson.
It was his general upon whom so many were looking, but there was curiosity among Stonewall's men, too, about Lee. As Harry drew back a little while the two generals talked, he found himself again with the officers of the Invincibles.
“He has grown gray since we were with him in Mexico, Hector,” he heard Colonel Leonidas Talbot say to Lieutenant-Colonel Hector St. Hilaire.
“Yes, Leonidas, grayer but stronger. What a brow and eye!”
St. Clair and Langdon, who had never seen Lee before, were eager.