ardy poplar, with a wide outlook toward the old field of Manassas.
Here he talked with one of his captains. "Too many men lost! I feel it
through and through that there is going to be heavy fighting. We'll have
to fill up somehow."

"Everybody from this region's in already. We might get some
fifteen-year-olds or some sixty-five-year-olds, though, or we might ask
the department for conscripts--"

"Don't like the latter material. Prefer the first. Well, we'll think
about it to-morrow--It's late, late, Haralson! Good-night."

"Wait," said Haralson. "Here's a man wants to speak to you."

Running up the hillside, from the platform where were the guns to a
little line of woods dark against the starlit sky, was a
cornfield--between it and the log and the poplar only a little grassy
depression. A man had come out of the cornfield. He stood ten feet
away--a countryman apparently, poorly dressed.

"Well, who are you?" demanded Pelham, "and how did you get in my lines?"

"I've been," said the man, "tramping it over from the mountains. And
when I got into this county I found it chock full of armies. I didn't
want to be taken up by the Yankees, and so I've been mostly travelling
by night. I was in that wood up there while you all were fighting. I had
a good view of the battle. When it was over I said to myself, 'After
all they're my folk,' and I came down through the corn. I was lying
there between the stalks; I heard you say you needed gunners. I said to
myself, 'I might as well join now as later. We've all got to join one
way or another, that's clear,' and so I thought, sir, I'd join you--"

"Why haven't you 'joined,' as you call it, before?"

"I've been right sick for a year or more, sir. I got a blow on the head
in a saw mill on Briony Creek and it made me just as useless as a bit of
pith. The doctor says I am all right now, sir. I got tired of staying on
Briony--"

"Do you know anything about guns?"

"I know all about a shotgun. I could learn the other."

"What's your name?"

"Philip Deaderick."

"Well, come into the firelight, Deaderick, so that I can see you."

Deaderick came, showed a powerful figure, and a steady bearded face.
"Well," said the Alabamian, "the blow on your head doesn't seem to have
put you out of the running! I'll try you, Deaderick."

"I am much obliged to you, sir."

"I haven't any awkward squad into which to put you. You'll have to
learn, and learn quickly, by watching the others. Take