Thus another gray day of winter wore away, and the two forces drew a little nearer to each other.  Far away the rival Presidents at Washington and Richmond were wondering what was happening to their armies in the dark wilderness of Western Tennessee.

The night was more quiet than the one that had just gone before.  The booming of the cannon as regular as the tolling of funeral bells had ceased with the darkness, but in its place the fierce winter wind had begun to blow again.  Dick, relaxed and weary after his day’s work, hovered over one of the fires and was grateful for the warmth.  He had trodden miles through slush and snow and frozen earth, and he was plastered to the waist with frozen mud, which now began to soften and fall off before the coals.

Warner, who had been on active duty, too, also sank to rest with a sigh of relief.

“It’s battle tomorrow, Dick,” he said, “and I don’t care.  As it didn’t come off today the chances are at least eighty per cent that it will happen the next day.  You say that when you were lying in the snow last night, Dick, you saw your uncle and that he’s a colonel in the rebel army.  It’s queer.”

“You’re wrong, George, it isn’t queer.  We’re on opposite sides, serving at the same place, and it’s natural that we should meet some time or other.  Oh, I tell you, you fellows from the New England and the other Northern States don’t appreciate the sacrifices that we of the border states make for the Union.  Up there you are safe from invasion.  Your houses are not on the battlefields.  You are all on one side.  You don’t have to fight against your own kind, the people you hold most dear.  And when the war is over, whether we win or lose, you’ll go back to unravaged regions.”

“You wrong me there, Dick.  I have thought of it.  It’s the people of the border, whether North or South, who pay the biggest price.  We risk our lives, but you risk your lives also, and everything else, too.”

Dick wrapped himself in a heavy blanket, pillowed his head on a log before one of the fires and dozed a while.  His nerves had been tried too hard to permit of easy sleep.  He awoke now and then and over a wide area saw the sinking fires and the moving forms of men.  He felt that a sense of uneasiness pervaded the officers.  He knew that many of them considered their forces inadequate for the siege of a fortress defended by a large army, but he felt with the sincerity of conviction also, that Grant would never withdraw.

He heard from Colonel Winchester about midnight in one of his wakeful intervals that General Grant was going down the river to see Commodore Foote.  The brave leader of the fleet had been wounded severely in the last fight with the fort, and the general wished to confer with him about the plan of operations.  But Dick heard only vaguely.  The statement made no impression upon him at that time.  Yet he was conscious that the feeling of uneasiness still pervaded the officers.  He noticed it in Colonel Winchester’s tone, and he noticed it, too, in the voices of Colonel Newcomb and Major Hertford, who came presently to confer with Winchester.