The general, too, was examining the distant lines, and Jack took it as a good omen that Sherman grew jocose and appeared to be making merry with Tyler, whose face looked troubled, now that the decisive moment seemed at hand.  But the day passed, and there was no advance.  It was not until late in the evening that the cause became known.  The army had been waiting for supplies, ammunition, and what not, that should have been on the field the day before.  The Caribees were made frantic, too, by what seemed a battle going on to the south of them, a few miles to the left.  The camp that night was a grand debating society, every man propounding a theory of strategy that would have edified General McDowell, no doubt, if he could have been given a precis of the whole.  How such things become known it is difficult to guess, but every man in the columns knew that the general had planned to put forward his thirty thousand men in the form of a half-moon, covering about ten miles from tip to tip.  The right or northward horn was to be considerably thicker and of more body than the left or southern.  When the time came this right was to curve in like a hook and cut the ground out from the left wing of the rebel army.

This is the homely way these unscientific strategists made the movement known to each other, and it very aptly describes the formulated plan of battle, save that, of course, there were gaps between the forces here and there along this human crescent.  Long before daylight Sherman’s brigade, with a battery of guns and a squadron of cavalry, set out due south, leaving the broad Warrenton pike far to their right hand.  Such a country as the march led into, no one had ever seen in the North outside of mountain regions—­deep gullies; wastes of gnarled and aggressive oaks, that tore clothes and flesh in the passage; sudden hillocks rising conical and inconsequent every few rods; deep chasms conducting driblets of water; morasses covered with dark and stagnant pools, where the pioneers fairly picked their steps among squirming reptiles.  A stream, sometimes large as a river, crawling languidly through deep fissures in the red shale, protected the left flank of the column.  The cavalry was forced to hold the narrow wood road, as the bush was hardly passable for men.

“Hi, Jack!” Barney cries, catching his breath at the edge of a muddy stream, “what sort of a place must the rebels be in if they let us promenade through such a jungle as this unopposed?”

“I have been thinking of that,” Jack replies.  And so had every man in the expedition—­for to think was one of the drawbacks as well as one of the excellences of the soldier in the civil war.  But presently, after five hours of laborious work, a halt is called.  The men dive into their haversacks, and even the brackish water in the nearest sedge pond has a flavor of nectar and the invigoration of a tonic.  On they tear again, the whole body pushing on in skirmish-like dispersion.  Suddenly the land changes.  They are climbing a rolling table-land, cleared in some places as though the axe of the settler had been at work.  The march is now easier and the picket-lines are strengthened.  Then a sharp volley comes, as if from the tree-tops.