It was conjectured that he was trying to find a way around
to take them in the rear, or to cross the ridge by the footpath.
Preparation was made to guard more closely the mountain-path across the spur,
and a detachment was sent up to strengthen the picket there.
The waiting told on the men and they grew bored and restless.
They gathered about the guns in groups and talked; talked of each piece some,
but not with the old spirit and vim; the loneliness of the mountain
seemed to oppress them; the mountains stretching up so brown and gray
on one side of them, and so brown and gray on the other, with their bare,
dark forests soughing from time to time as the wind swept up the pass.
The minds of the men seemed to go back to the time when they were
not so alone, but were part of a great and busy army, and some of them
fell to talking of the past, and the battles they had figured in,
and of the comrades they had lost. They told them off in a slow
and colorless way, as if it were all part of the past as much as the dead
they named. One hundred and nineteen times they had been in action.
Only seventeen men were left of the eighty odd who had first enlisted
in the battery, and of these four were at home crippled for life.
Two of the oldest men had been among the half-dozen who had fallen
in the skirmish just the day before.
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