Within an hour all was ready, but they could not set out until the next morning, when, by eight o’clock, the three ladies were en route.  There was a large company with them, all under a flag of truce.  They passed through the long lines of soldiery that lay intrenched on the Virginia side of the Potomac, and pushed on to Annandale, where the rebel outpost received them.  Olympia’s eyes dwelt on the wide-stretching lands of pine and oak, remembering the pictures Jack had given in his letters of this very same route.  But there were few signs of war.  The cleared places lay red and baking under the hot August sun; the trees seemed crisp and sapless.

At Fairfax Court-House, where the first signs of real warlike tenure were seen, the visitors were taken into a low frame house, and each in turn asked to explain the objects of her mission.  Then the hospital reports were searched.  In half a dozen or more instances the sad-eyed mothers were thrown into tremulous hope by the tidings of their darlings’ whereabouts.  But for Olympia and Aunt Merry there was no clew.  No such names as Sprague or Perley were recorded in the fateful pages of the hospital corps.  But there were several badly wounded in the hospital at Manassas, where fuller particulars were accessible.

They were conducted very politely by a young lieutenant in a shabby gray uniform to an ambulance and driven four miles southward to Fairfax Station on the railway, when, after despairing hours of waiting, they were taken by train to Manassas.  An orderly accompanied them, and as the train passed beyond Union Mills, where the Bull Run River runs along the railway a mile or more before crossing under it, the young soldier pointed out the distant plateau, near the famous stone bridge, and, when the train crossed the river, the high bluffs, a half-mile to the northward, where the action had begun at Blackburn’s Ford.  He was very respectful and gentle in alluding to the battle, and said, ingenuously, pointing to the plateau jutting out from the Bull Run Mountains: 

“At two o’clock on Sunday we would have cried quits to McDowell to hold his ground and let us alone.  But just as we were on our heel to turn, Joe Johnston came piling in here, right where you see that gully yonder, with ten thousand fresh men, and in twenty minutes we were three to one, and then your folks had the worst of it.  President Davis got off the train at the junction yonder, and as he rode across this field, where we are now, the woods yonder were full of our men, flying from the Henry House Hill, where Sherman had cut General Bee’s brigade to pieces and was routing Jackson—­’Stonewall,’ we call him now, because General Bonham, when he brought up the reserves, shouted, ’See, there, where Jackson stands like a stone wall!’ He’s a college professor and very pious; he makes his men pray before fighting, and has ‘meetings’ in the commissary tent twice a week.”

“Did Mr. Davis join in the battle?” Olympia asked, more to seem interested in the garrulous warrior’s narrative than because she really had her mind on the story.