“Good old John.  I hope he wasn’t killed.”

“And I hope so too, from the bottom of my heart.  But we’ll know before many days.”

“How will you find out?” asked Harry curiously.

Both colonels laughed genially.

“Because he will send us signs, unmistakable signs,” replied Colonel Talbot.

“I don’t understand, sir.”

“His signs will be shells, shrapnel and solid shot.  We may not have a battle this week or next week, but a big one is bound to come some time or other and then if any section of the Northern artillery shows uncommon deadliness and precision we’ll know that Carrington is there.  Why, we can recognize his presence as readily as the deer scents the hunter.  We’ll have many notes to compare with him when the war is over.”

Harry sincerely hoped that the three would meet in friendship around some festive table, and he was moved by the affection and admiration the two colonels held for Carrington.  Doubtless the great artilleryman’s feelings toward them were the same.

They went into camp once more that night in a pleasant rolling country of high hills, rich valleys, scattered forests, and swift streams of clear water.  Harry liked this Northern land, which was yet not so far from the South.  It was not more beautiful than his own Kentucky, but it was much trimmer and neater than the states toward the Gulf.  He saw all about him the evidences of free labor, the proof that man worked more readily, and with better results, when success or failure were all his own.

He was too young to spend much time in concentrated thinking, but as he looked upon the neat Pennsylvania houses and farms and the cultivated fields he felt the curse of black slavery in the South, but he felt also that it was for the South itself to abolish it, and not for the armed hand of the outsider, an outsider to whom its removal meant no financial loss and dislocation.

Despite himself his mind dwelt upon these things longer than before.  He disliked slavery, his father disliked it, and nearly all their friends and relatives, and here they were fighting for it, as one of the two great reasons of the Civil War.  He felt anew how strangely things come about, and that even the wisest cannot always choose their own courses as they wish them.

A fire, chiefly for cooking purposes, had been built for the general and his staff in a cove surrounded by trees.  A small cold spring gushed from the side of a hill, flowed down the center of the cove, and then made its way through the trees into the wider world beyond.  It was a fine little spring, and before the general came, the younger members of the staff knelt and drank deeply at it.  It brought thoughts of home to all these young rovers of the woods, who had drunk a thousand times before at just such springs as this.

Soon Lee and his generals sat there on the stones or on the moss.  Longstreet, Stuart, Pickett, Alexander, Ewell, Early, Hill and many others, some suffering from wounds, were with their commander, while the young officers who were to fetch and carry sat on the fringe in the woods, or stretched themselves on the turf.