The six guns gleamed red in the light of the kindled fires. The men sat or lay between them, tasting rest after battle. Below this platform, in the orchard and on the turnpike and in the woods beyond, showed also fires and moving lights. The air was yet smoky, the night close and warm. There were no tents nor roofs of any nature. Officers and men rested in the open beneath the August stars. Pelham had a log beneath a Lombardy poplar, with a wide outlook toward the old field of Manassas. Here he talked with one of his captains. "Too many men lost! I feel it through and through that there is going to be heavy fighting. We'll have to fill up somehow."
"Everybody from this region's in already. We might get some fifteen-year-olds or some sixty-five-year-olds, though, or we might ask the department for conscripts—"
"Don't like the latter material. Prefer the first. Well, we'll think about it to-morrow—It's late, late, Haralson! Good-night."
"Wait," said Haralson. "Here's a man wants to speak to you."
Running up the hillside, from the platform where were the guns to a little line of woods dark against the starlit sky, was a cornfield—between it and the log and the poplar only a little grassy depression. A man had come out of the cornfield. He stood ten feet away—a countryman apparently, poorly dressed.
"Well, who are you?" demanded Pelham, "and how did you get in my lines?"
"I've been," said the man, "tramping it over from the mountains. And when I got into this county I found it chock full of armies. I didn't want to be taken up by the Yankees, and so I've been mostly travelling by night. I was in that wood up there while you all were fighting. I had a good view of the battle. When it was over I said to myself, 'After all they're my folk,' and I came down through the corn. I was lying there between the stalks; I heard you say you needed gunners. I said to myself, 'I might as well join now as later. We've all got to join one way or another, that's clear,' and so I thought, sir, I'd join you—"
"Why haven't you 'joined,' as you call it, before?"
"I've been right sick for a year or more, sir. I got a blow on the head in a saw mill on Briony Creek and it made me just as useless as a bit of pith. The doctor says I am all right now, sir. I got tired of staying on Briony—"
"Do you know anything about guns?"