a place of conspicuous note, you might
have known that Shiloh had been fought. There was that feeling of
desolation in the land that remains after armies have passed over, let
them tread never so lightly.

"D'you know what them rails is put that way fur?" asked the man. He
pointed down with his buggy-whip just off the roadside, first on one
hand and then on the other.

"No," said Mary, turning the sun-bonnet's limp front toward the
questioner and then to the disjointed fence on her nearer side; "that's
what I've been wondering for days. They've been ordinary worm fences,
haven't they?"

"Jess so," responded the man, with his accustomed twinkle. "But I think
I see you oncet or twicet lookin' at 'em and sort o' tryin' to make out
how come they got into that shape." The long-reiterated W's of the
rail-fence had been pulled apart into separate V's, and the two sides
of each of these had been drawn narrowly together, so that what had been
two parallel lines of fence, with the lane between, was now a long
double row of wedge-shaped piles of rails, all pointing into the woods
on the left.

"How did it happen?" asked Mary, with a smile of curiosity.

"Didn't happen at all, 'twas jess _done_ by live men, and in a powerful
few minutes at that. Sort o' shows what we're approachin' unto, as it
were, eh? Not but they's plenty behind us done the same way, all the way
back into Kentuck', as you already done see; but this's been done sence
the last rain, and it rained night afore last."

"Still I'm not sure what it means," said Mary; "has there been fighting
here?"

"Go up head," said the man, with a facetious gesture. "See? The fight
came through these here woods, here. 'Taint been much over twenty-four
hours, I reckon, since every one o' them-ah sort o' shut-up-fan-shape
sort o' fish-traps had a gray-jacket in it layin' flat down an' firin'
through the rails, sort o' random-like, only not much so." His manner of
speech seemed a sort of harlequin patchwork from the bad English of many
sections, the outcome of a humorous and eclectic fondness for verbal
deformities. But his lightness received a sudden check.

"Heigh-h-h!" he gravely and softly exclaimed, gathering the reins
closer, as the horse swerved and dashed ahead. Two or three buzzards
started up from the roadside, with their horrid flapping and whiff of
quills, and circled low overhead. "Heigh-h-h!" he continued soothingly.
"Ho-o-o-o! somebody lost a good nag there,--