The three put their glasses to their eyes and saw a man on horseback waving a flag.  The head of the horse was turned toward some hill farther south, and the man was evidently making signals to another patrol there.

“A Johnny,” said Pennington.  “I suppose they’re sending the word on toward Early that we’re passing.”

“From hill to hill,” said Dick.  “A message can be sent a long way in that manner.”

“I don’t think it will interfere with us,” said Warner.  “They’re merely telling about us.  They don’t intend to attack us.  They haven’t the men to spare.”

“No, they won’t attack, they know I’m here,” said Pennington.

The three colonels did not stop the column, but they watched the signals as they rode.  Nobody was able to interpret them, not even Shepard, but they felt that they could ignore them.  Colonel Hertford, nevertheless, sent off a strong scouting party in that direction, but as it approached the horseman on the hill rode over the other side and disappeared.

All that day they advanced through a lonely and hostile country.  It was a region intensely Southern in its sympathies, and it seemed that everybody, including the women and children, had fled before them.  Horses and cattle were gone also and its loneliness was accentuated by the fact that not so long before it had been a well-peopled land, where now the houses stood empty and silent.  They saw no human beings, save other watchmen on the hills making signals, but they were far away and soon gone.

By noon both horses and men showed great fatigue.  They had slept but little the night before, and, toughened as they were by war, they had reached the limit of endurance.  So the trumpet sounded the halt in a meadow beside a fine stream, and all, save those who were to ride on the outskirts and watch for the enemy, dismounted gladly.  A vast drinking followed.  The water was clear, running over clean pebbles, and a thousand men knelt and drank again and again.  Then the horses were allowed to drink their fill, which they did with mighty gurglings of satisfaction, and the men cooked their midday meal.

Meanwhile they talked of Sheridan.  All expected battle and then battle again when they joined him, and they looked forward to a great campaign in the valley.  That valley was not so far away.  The blue walls of the mountains that hemmed its eastern edge were very near now.  Dick looked at them through his glasses, not to find an enemy, but merely for the pleasure of bringing out the heavy forests on their slopes.  It was true that the leaves were already touched by the summer’s heat, but in the distance at least the mass looked green.  He knew also that under the screen of the leaves the grass preserved its freshness and there were many little streams, foaming in white as they rushed down the steep slopes.  It was a marvelously pleasing sight to him, and, as the wilderness thus called, he was once more deeply grateful that he had escaped from the muddy trench.