The moon rode high, and it has looked down upon no more extraordinary scene than this, the enemies drinking together in friendship at the spring, and all about them the stony ramparts of the hills, bristling with cannon, and covered with riflemen, ready for a red dawn, and the fields and ridges on which thirty thousand had already fallen, dead or wounded.
"Another meeting, Mr. Kenton," said a man who had been bent down drinking. As he rose the moonlight shone full upon his face and Harry was startled. And yet it was not strange that he should be there. The face revealed to Harry was one of uncommon power. It seemed to him that the features had grown more massive. The powerful chin and the large, slightly curved nose showed indomitable spirit and resolution. The face was tanned almost to blackness by all kinds of weather. Harry would not have known him at first, had it not been for his voice.
"We do meet in unexpected places and at unexpected times, Mr. Shepard," he said.
"I'm not merely trying to be polite, when I tell you that I'm glad to find you alive. You and I have seen battles, but never another like this."
"And I can truthfully welcome you, Mr. Shepard, as an old acquaintance and no real enemy."
It was an impulse but a noble one that made the two, different in years and so unlike, shake hands with a firm and honest grip.
"Your army will come again in the morning," said Shepard, not as a question, but as a statement of fact.
"Can you doubt it?"
"No, I don't, but to-morrow night, Mr. Kenton, you will recall what I told you at our first meeting in Montgomery more than two years ago."
"You said that we could not win."