Searing pushed forward across the line of abandoned
pits, running from cover to cover in the more open forest, his eyes
vigilant to discover possible stragglers. He came to the edge of a
plantation--one of those forlorn, deserted homesteads of the last years
of the war, upgrown with brambles, ugly with broken fences and desolate
with vacant buildings having blank apertures in place of doors and
windows. After a keen reconnoissance from the safe seclusion of a clump
of young pines Searing ran lightly across a field and through an orchard
to a small structure which stood apart from the other farm buildings, on
a slight elevation. This he thought would enable him to overlook a large
scope of country in the direction that he supposed the enemy to have
taken in withdrawing. This building, which had originally consisted of a
single room elevated upon four posts about ten feet high, was now little
more than a roof; the floor had fallen away, the joists and planks
loosely piled on the ground below or resting on end at various angles,
not wholly torn from their fastenings above. The supporting posts were
themselves no longer vertical. It looked as if the whole edifice would
go down at the touch of a finger.

Concealing himself in the debris of joists and flooring Searing looked
across the open ground between his point of view and a spur of Kennesaw
Mountain, a half-mile away. A road leading up and across this spur was
crowded with troops--the rear-guard of the retiring enemy, their
gun-barrels gleaming in the morning sunlight.

Searing had now learned all that he could hope to know. It was his duty
to return to his own command with all possible speed and report his
discovery. But the gray column of Confederates toiling up the mountain
road was singularly tempting. His rifle--an ordinary "Springfield," but
fitted with a globe sight and hair-trigger--would easily send its ounce
and a quarter of lead hissing into their midst. That would probably not
affect the duration and result of the war, but it is the business of a
soldier to kill. It is also his habit if he is a good soldier. Searing
cocked his rifle and "set" the trigger.

But it was decreed from the beginning of time that Private Searing was
not to murder anybody that bright summer morning, nor was the
Confederate retreat to be announced by him. For countless ages events
had been so matching themselves together in that wondrous mosaic to some
parts of which, dimly discerni