me a spatter of musketry, sweeping along an
invisible line and making faint sheets of orange light.

Some in the new skirmish lines were beginning to fire at various shadows
discerned in the vapour, forms of men suddenly revealed by some humour
of the laggard masses of clouds. The crackle of musketry began to
dominate the purring of the hostile bullets. Dan, in the front rank,
held his rifle poised, and looked into the fog keenly, coldly, with the
air of a sportsman. His nerves were so steady that it was as if they had
been drawn from his body, leaving him merely a muscular machine; but his
numb heart was somehow beating to the pealing march of the fight.

The waving skirmish line went backward and forward, ran this way and
that way. Men got lost in the fog, and men were found again. Once they
got too close to the formidable ridge, and the thing burst out as if
repulsing a general attack. Once another blue regiment was apprehended
on the very edge of firing into them. Once a friendly battery began an
elaborate and scientific process of extermination. Always as busy as
brokers, the men slid here and there over the plain, fighting their
foes, escaping from their friends, leaving a history of many movements
in the wet yellow turf, cursing the atmosphere, blazing away every time
they could identify the enemy.

In one mystic changing of the fog, as if the fingers of spirits were
drawing aside these draperies, a small group of the gray skirmishers,
silent, statuesque, were suddenly disclosed to Dan and those about him.
So vivid and near were they that there was something uncanny in the
revelation.

There might have been a second of mutual staring. Then each rifle in
each group was at the shoulder. As Dan's glance flashed along the barrel
of his weapon, the figure of a man suddenly loomed as if the musket had
been a telescope. The short black beard, the slouch hat, the pose of the
man as he sighted to shoot, made a quick picture in Dan's mind. The same
moment, it would seem, he pulled his own trigger, and the man, smitten,
lurched forward, while his exploding rifle made a slanting crimson
streak in the air, and the slouch hat fell before the body. The billows
of the fog, governed by singular impulses, rolled between.

"You got that feller sure enough," said a comrade to Dan. Dan looked at
him absent-mindedly.

V.

When the next morning calmly displayed another fog, the men of the
regiment exchanged eloquent com