ear the same point she had, and stood looking at her with a
world of wonder at the whole night's experience in her great brown eyes.

"Poor thing," said Rachel sympathetically. "This is only the beginning.
Heaven knows what we won't have to go through with before the sun
rises."

She tried to mount, but her watery garments were too much for her
agility, and with the wet skirts fettering her limbs she began toiling
painfully over the spongy, plowed ground, in search of a stump or a
rock. She thought she saw many around her, but on approaching one after
another found they were only large cotton plants, with a boll or two of
ungathered cotton on them, which aided the darkness in giving them their
deceptive appearance. She prevented herself from traveling in a circle,
by remembering this aptitude of benighted travelers, and keeping her eye
steadily fixed on a distant camp-fire. When she at last came to the edge
of the field she had to lean against the fence for some minutes before
she could recover from her fatigue sufficiently to climb upon it.
While she sat for a minute there she heard some cocks, at a neighboring
farm-house, crow the turn of night.

"It is midnight," she said feverishly, "and I have only begun the
journey. Now let every nerve and muscle do its utmost."

She rode along the fence until she came to an opening which led into
what appeared in the darkness to be another cotton field, but proved to
be a worn-out one, long ago abandoned to the rank-growing briars, which
clung to and tore her skirts, and seamed the mare's delicate skin with
bleeding furrows. The flinching brute pressed onward, in response to her
mistress's encouragement, but the progress was grievously slow.

Presently Rachel began to see moving figures a little way ahead of her,
and hear voices in command. She realized that she was approaching the
forces moving to the attack on the Union right. There was something
grotesque, weird, even frightful in the sounds and the aspect of the
moving masses and figures, but she at last made out that they were
batteries, regiments and mounted men. She decided that her best course
was to mingle with and move along with them, until she could get a
chance to ride away in advance. For hours that seemed weeks she remained
entangled in the slow-moving mass, whose bewildering vagaries of motion
were as trying to the endurance of her steed as they were exasperating
to her own impatience. Occasionally she caught