le-ground is going to be."

"Not all the time, I hope," said Rodney.

"Of course not. We'll drive the enemy back on St. Louis, and wind up by
taking that city. General Pillow will march up from New Madrid to
co-operate with us, and perhaps he will stop on the way to take Cairo. I
hope he will, to pay those Illinois chaps for robbing the St. Louis
armory."

This was a very pretty programme but the captain thought it could be
easily carried out, and the very next day he heard a piece of news which
caused him to make several additions to it. As the squad was moving past
a plantation house an excited man, who was in too great a hurry to get
his hat, rushed down to the gate flourishing a paper over his head and
shouted, at the top of his voice:

"Hurrah for Jeff Davis! Hurrah for Johnston! Hurrah for Bull Run and all
the rest of 'em!"

"What's up?" inquired the captain, reining in his horse.

"Here's something that one of Price's men slung at me yesterday while he
was riding along," replied the planter, opening the gate and placing the
paper in the officer's eager palm. "Aint we walking over 'em roughshod
though, and didn't I say all the while that we were bound to do it? A
Northern mechanic has got no business alongside a Southern gentleman."

"Have we had a fight?" asked the captain. "I wonder if my regiment was
in it."

"No, I don't reckon it was," answered the man, with a laugh. "You see it
happened out in Virginny, a few miles from Washington. I wish I might
get a later paper'n that, for I calculate to read in it that our boys
are in Washington dictating--"

"Hey--youp!" yelled the captain, who began to understand the matter
now.

"Price's men whooped and yelled worse'n that when they went by
yesterday," said the man, jumping up and knocking his heels together
like a boy who had just been turned loose from school. "That's Davis's
dispatch right there. He went out from Richmond to watch the fight, and
got there just in time to see the Yankees running."

The officer, who was worked up to such a pitch of excitement that the
paper rustled in his trembling hands, glanced over the black headlines
to which the planter directed his attention, and then read the dispatch
aloud so that his men could hear it. It ran as follows:

"Night has closed upon a hard-fought field. Our forces were victorious.
The battle was fought mainly on our left. Our forces were fifteen
thousand; that of the enemy estimated at thirty-five