f the foot cavalry, the main column
moved up the Valley pike, violet in the shadow, gold in the sun. The
ten-minutes-out-of-an-hour halts were shortened to five minutes. During
one of these rests Jackson came down the line. The men cheered him.
"Thirty miles to-day. You must do thirty miles to-day, men." He went by,
galloping forward to the immense and motley convoy. The men laughed,
well pleased with themselves and with him. "Old Jack's got to see if his
lemons are all right! If we don't get those lemon wagons through safe to
Staunton there'll be hell to pay! Go 'way! we know he won't call it
hell!"

"The butcher had a little dog,
And Bingo was his name.

B-i-n-g-o-go-! B-i-n-g-o-go!
And Bingo was his name!"

"_Fall in!_ Oh, Lord, we just fell out!"

Advance, convoy, main column, camped that night around and in Strasburg,
Strasburg jubilant, welcoming, restless through the summer night. Winder
with the Stonewall Brigade bivouacked at Newtown, twelve miles north. He
had made a wonderful march. The men, asleep the instant they touched the
earth, lay like dead. The rest was not long; between one and two the
bugles called and the regiments were again in motion. A courier had
come from Jackson. "_General Winder, you will press forward._"

Silent, with long, steady, swinging tread, the Stonewall moved up the
Valley. Before it, pale, undulating, mysterious beneath the stars, ran
the turnpike, the wonderful Valley road, the highway that had grown
familiar to the army as its hand. The Army of the Valley endowed the
Valley pike with personality. They spoke of it as "her." They blamed her
for mud and dust, for shadeless, waterless stretches, for a habit she
was acquiring of furrows and worn places, for the aid which she
occasionally gave to hostile armies, for the hills which she presented,
for the difficulties of her bordering stone walls when troops must be
deployed, for the weeds and nettles, thistles, and briars, with which
she had a trick of decking her sides, for her length. "You kin march
most to Kingdom Come on this here old road!" for the heat of the sun,
the chill of the frost, the strength of the blast. In blander moods they
caressed her name. "Wish I could see the old pike once more!"--"Ain't
any road in the world like the Valley pike, and never was! _She_ never
behaved herself like this damned out-of-corduroy-into-mud-hole,