long
legs, irresistibly recalling, as their gaunt, athletic frames and
sunburnt faces appeared here and there among the pines, the lumber
regions of their native State, with which I was not unfamiliar.

We passed through a former camp of the Rebels, from which everything had
been lately removed; but when the utmost permitted limits of our
reconnoissance were reached, there were still no signs of any other
camp, and the Rebel cavalry still kept provokingly before us. Their
evident object was to lure us on to their own stronghold, and had we
fallen into the trap, it would perhaps have resembled, on a smaller
scale, the Olustee of the following year. With a good deal of
reluctance, however, I caused the recall to be sounded, and, after a
slight halt, we began to retrace our steps.

Straining our eyes to look along the reach of level railway which
stretched away through the pine barren, we began to see certain ominous
puffs of smoke, which might indeed proceed from some fire in the woods,
but were at once set down by the men as coming from the mysterious
locomotive battery which the Rebels were said to have constructed.
Gradually the smoke grew denser, and appeared to be moving up along the
track, keeping pace with our motion, and about two miles distant. I
watched it steadily through a field-glass from our own slowly moving
battery: it seemed to move when we moved and to halt when we halted.
Sometimes in the dim smoke I caught a glimpse of something blacker,
raised high in the air like the threatening head of some great gliding
serpent. Suddenly there came a sharp puff of lighter smoke that seemed
like a forked tongue, and then a hollow report, and we could see a
great black projectile hurled into the air, and falling a quarter of a
mile away from us, in the woods. I did not at once learn that this first
shot killed two of the Maine men and wounded two more. This was fired
wide, but the numerous shots which followed were admirably aimed, and
seldom failed to fall or explode close to our own smaller battery.

It was the first time that the men had been seriously exposed to
artillery fire,--a danger more exciting to the ignorant mind than any
other, as this very war has shown.[D] So I watched them anxiously.
Fortunately there were deep trenches on each side the railway, with many
stout projecting roots, forming very tolerable bomb-proofs for those who
happened to be near them. The enemy's gun was a sixty-four-pound
Blake