starts through the forest-aisles, and there is sudden silence.  Every man knows that voice, and loves the boy who owns it—­little Tom Morgan, Dan’s brother-in-arms, the General’s seventeen-year-old brother—­and there he stands leaning against a tree, full in the light of the fire, a handsome, gallant figure—­a song like a seraph’s pouring from his lips.  One bearded soldier is gazing at him with curious intentness, and when the song ceases, lies down with a suddenly troubled face.  He has seen the “death-look” in the boy’s eyes—­that prophetic death-look in which he has unshaken faith.  The night deepens, figures roll up in blankets, quiet comes, and Dan lies wide awake and deep in memories, and looking back on those early helpless days of the war with a tolerant smile.

He was a war-worn veteran now, but how vividly he could recall that first night in the camp of a big army, in the very woods where he now lay—­dusk settling over the Green River country, which Morgan’s Men grew to love so well; a mocking-bird singing a farewell song from the top of a stunted oak to the dead summer and the dying day; Morgan seated on a cracker-box in front of his tent, contemplatively chewing one end of his mustache; Lieutenant Hunt swinging from his horse, smiling grimly.

“It would make a horse laugh—­a Yankee cavalry horse, anyhow—­to see this army.”

Hunt had been over the camp that first afternoon on a personal tour of investigation.  They were not a thousand Springfield and Enfield rifles at that time in Johnston’s army.  Half of the soldiers were armed with shotguns and squirrel rifle and the greater part of the other half with flintlock muskets.  But nearly every man, thinking he was in for a rough-and-tumble fight, had a bowie knife and a revolver swung to his belt.

“Those Arkansas and Texas fellows have got knives that would make a Malay’s blood run cold.”

“Well, they’ll do to hew firewood and cut meat,” laughed Morgan.

The troops were not only badly armed.  On his tour, Hunt had seen men making blankets of pieces of old carpet, lined on one side with a piece of cotton cloth; men wearing ox-hide buskins, or complicated wrapping of rags, for shoes; orderly sergeants making out reports on shingles; surgeon using a twisted handkerchief instead of a tourniquet.  There was a total lack of medicine, and camp diseases were already breaking out—­measles, typhoid fever, pneumonia, bowel troubles—­each fatal, it seemed, in time of war.

“General Johnston has asked Richmond for a stand of thirty thousand arms,” Morgan had mused, and Hunt looked up inquiringly.

“Mr. Davis can only spare a thousand.”

“That’s lucky,” said Hunt, grimly.