“It seems a long time,” he thought, “but I cannot have come very far; I am still alive.”

He smiled at his own method of estimating distance, and crept forward.  A moment later he suddenly flattened himself upon the earth and lay motionless, minute after minute.  Through a narrow opening in the bushes he had caught sight of a small mound of yellow clay—­one of the enemy’s rifle-pits.  After some little time he cautiously raised his head, inch by inch, then his body upon his hands, spread out on each side of him, all the while intently regarding the hillock of clay.  In another moment he was upon his feet, rifle in hand, striding rapidly forward with little attempt at concealment.  He had rightly interpreted the signs, whatever they were; the enemy was gone.

To assure himself beyond a doubt before going back to report upon so important a matter, Searing pushed forward across the line of abandoned pits, running from cover to cover in the more open forest, his eyes vigilant to discover possible stragglers.  He came to the edge of a plantation—­one of those forlorn, deserted homesteads of the last years of the war, upgrown with brambles, ugly with broken fences and desolate with vacant buildings having blank apertures in place of doors and windows.  After a keen reconnoissance from the safe seclusion of a clump of young pines Searing ran lightly across a field and through an orchard to a small structure which stood apart from the other farm buildings, on a slight elevation.  This he thought would enable him to overlook a large scope of country in the direction that he supposed the enemy to have taken in withdrawing.  This building, which had originally consisted of a single room elevated upon four posts about ten feet high, was now little more than a roof; the floor had fallen away, the joists and planks loosely piled on the ground below or resting on end at various angles, not wholly torn from their fastenings above.  The supporting posts were themselves no longer vertical.  It looked as if the whole edifice would go down at the touch of a finger.

Concealing himself in the debris of joists and flooring Searing looked across the open ground between his point of view and a spur of Kennesaw Mountain, a half-mile away.  A road leading up and across this spur was crowded with troops—­the rear-guard of the retiring enemy, their gun-barrels gleaming in the morning sunlight.

Searing had now learned all that he could hope to know.  It was his duty to return to his own command with all possible speed and report his discovery.  But the gray column of Confederates toiling up the mountain road was singularly tempting.  His rifle—­an ordinary “Springfield,” but fitted with a globe sight and hair-trigger—­would easily send its ounce and a quarter of lead hissing into their midst.  That would probably not affect the duration and result of the war, but it is the business of a soldier to kill.  It is also his habit if he is a good soldier.  Searing cocked his rifle and “set” the trigger.