rsisted the sergeant, "an' he can't be here
for several days, 'cause the roads are mighty deep in the spring mud.
Don't say any man is here until he is here. An' I tell you that General
Johnston, with whom we've got to deal, is a great man. I wasn't with
him when he made that great march through the blizzards an' across the
plains to Salt Lake City to make the Mormons behave, but I've served
with them that was. An' I've never yet found one of them who didn't say
General Johnston was a mighty big man. Soldiers know when the right kind
of a man is holdin' the reins an' drivin' 'em. Didn't we all feel that
we was bein' driv right when General Grant took hold?"

"We all felt it," said the three in chorus.

"Of course you did," said the sergeant, "an' now I've got a kind of
uneasy feelin' over General Johnston. Why don't we hear somethin' from
him? Why don't we know what he's doin'? We haven't sent out any scoutin'
parties. On the plains, no matter how strong we was, we was always
on the lookout for hostile Indians, while here we know there is a big
Confederate army somewhere within fifty miles of us, but don't take the
trouble to look it up."

"That's so," said Warner. "Caution represents less than five per cent of
our effectiveness. But I suppose we can whip the Johnnies anyway."

"Of course we can," said Pennington, who was always of a most buoyant
temperament.

Sergeant Whitley went to the shutterless window, and looked out at the
forest and the long array of tents.

"The rain is about over," he said. "It was just a passin' shower. But
it looks as if it had already added a fresh shade of green to the leaves
and grass. Cur'us how quick a rain can do it in spring, when everything
is just waitin' a chance to grow, and bust into bloom. I've rid on the
plains when everything was brown an' looked dead. 'Long come a big rain
an' the next day everything was green as far as the eye could reach an'
you'd see little flowers bloomin' down under the shelter of the grass."

"I didn't know you had a poetical streak in you, sergeant," said Dick,
who marked his abrupt change from the discussion of the war to a far
different topic.

"I think some of it is in every man," replied Sergeant Whitley gravely.
"I remember once that when we had finished a long chase after some
Northern Cheyennes through mighty rough and dry country we came to a
little valley, a kind of a pocket in the hills, fed by a fine creek,
runnin' out of the mounta