urn it loose on blue
people!"--"That battery is tired; it's going home! Right tired myself.
Reckon we're all tired but Old Jack. He don't never get tired. This is a
pretty behaving gun--" "That's so! and she's got good men. They do
first-rate."--"That's so! Even the new one's good"--"Good! He learned
that gun same as though they _grew_ artillery wherever he came from.
Briery Creek--No, Briony Creek--hey, Deaderick?"

"Briony Creek."

Stafford dropped his hand. "Who spoke?"

The question had been breathed, not loudly uttered. No one answered. The
gunners continued their movements about the guns, stooping, handling,
lifting themselves upright. It was all but night, the lightning less and
less violent, revealing little beyond mere shape and action. Stafford
sank back. "Storm within and storm without. They breed delusions!"

The blue battery opposite limbered up and went away. The musketry fire
in the hollows between the hills grew desultory. A slow crackle of shots
would be followed by silence; then might come with fierce energy a
sudden volley; silence followed it, too,--or what, by comparison, seemed
silence. The thunder rolled more and more distantly, the wind lashed the
trees, the rain beat upon the guns. Officers and men of the horse
artillery were too tired, too wet, and too busy for much conversation,
but still human voices came and went in the lessening blast, in the
semi-darkness and the streaming rain.

There was a gunner near Stafford who worked in silence and rested from
his work in silence. Stafford became conscious of him during one of the
latter periods--a silent man, leaning against his gun. He was not ten
feet away, but the twilight was now deep, and he rested indistinct, a
shadow against a shadow. Once there came a pale lightning flash, but his
arm was raised as if to shield his eyes, and there was seen but a
strongly made gunner with a sponge staff. Darkness came again at once.
The impression that remained with Stafford was that the gunner's face
was turned toward him, that he had, indeed, when the flash came, been
regarding him somewhat closely. That was nothing--a man not of the
battery, a staff officer sitting on a disabled gun, waiting till he
could make his way back to his chief--a moment's curiosity on an
artilleryman's part, exhibited in a lull between fighting. Stafford had
a certain psychic development. A thinker, he was adventurous in that
world; to him, the true world of action. The passi