Pursuit may be, it seems to me,
  Perfect without possession.

There can be no doubt that the wealthy sportsmen who have made a preserve of the Cheat Mountain region will find plenty of game if it has not died since 1861.  We left it there.

Yet hunting and idling were not the whole of life’s programme up there on that wild ridge with its shaggy pelt of spruce and firs, and in the riparian lowlands that it parted.  We had a bit of war now and again.  There was an occasional “affair of outposts”; sometimes a hazardous scout into the enemy’s country, ordered, I fear, more to keep up the appearance of doing something than with a hope of accomplishing a military result.  But one day it was bruited about that a movement in force was to be made on the enemy’s position miles away, at the summit of the main ridge of the Alleghanies—­the camp whose faint blue smoke we had watched for weary days.  The movement was made, as was the fashion in those ’prentice days of warfare, in two columns, which were to pounce upon the foeman from opposite sides at the same moment.  Led over unknown roads by untrusty guides, encountering obstacles not foreseen—­miles apart and without communication, the two columns invariably failed to execute the movement with requisite secrecy and precision.  The enemy, in enjoyment of that inestimable military advantage known in civilian speech as being “surrounded,” always beat the attacking columns one at a time or, turning red-handed from the wreck of the first, frightened the other away.

All one bright wintry day we marched down from our eyrie; all one bright wintry night we climbed the great wooded ridge opposite.  How romantic it all was; the sunset valleys full of visible sleep; the glades suffused and interpenetrated with moonlight; the long valley of the Greenbrier stretching away to we knew not what silent cities; the river itself unseen under its “astral body” of mist!  Then there was the “spice of danger.”

Once we heard shots in front; then there was a long wait.  As we trudged on we passed something—­some things—­lying by the wayside.  During another wait we examined them, curiously lifting the blankets from their yellow-clay faces.  How repulsive they looked with their blood-smears, their blank, staring eyes, their teeth uncovered by contraction of the lips!  The frost had begun already to whiten their deranged clothing.  We were as patriotic as ever, but we did not wish to be that way.  For an hour afterward the injunction of silence in the ranks was needless.

* * * * *

Repassing the spot the next day, a beaten, dispirited and exhausted force, feeble from fatigue and savage from defeat, some of us had life enough left, such as it was, to observe that these bodies had altered their position.  They appeared also to have thrown off some of their clothing, which lay near by, in disorder.  Their expression, too, had an added blankness—­they had no faces.