more'n a few yards beyond their beats.
What time is it, Mr. Mason?"

"A little past one in the morning, sergeant."

"Enough of the night left yet for a lot of mischief. I'm glad, sir,
if I may make bold once more, that the Winchester men stay out of the
tents and keep awake."

Warner joined them, and reported that fresh messengers from the front had
given renewed assurances of quiet. Absolutely nothing was stirring along
Cedar Creek, but Sergeant Daniel Whitley was still dissatisfied.

"It's always where nothin' is stirrin' that most is doin', sir," he said
to Dick.

"You're epigrammatic, sergeant."

"I'm what, sir? I was never called that before."

"It doesn't depreciate you. It's a flattering adjective, but you've set
my own nerves to tingling and I don't feel like sleeping."

"It never hurts, sir, to watch in war, even when nothing happens.
I remember once when we were in a blizzard west of the Missouri, only a
hundred of us. It was in the country of the Northern Cheyennes, an' no
greater fighters ever lived than them red demons. We got into a kind of
dip, surrounded by trees, an' managed to build a fire. We was so busy
tryin' to keep from freezin' to death that we never gave a thought to
Indians, that is 'ceptin' one, the guide, Jim Palmer, who knowed them
Cheyennes, an' who kept dodgin' about in the blizzard, facin' the icy
blast an' the whirlin' snow, an' always lookin' an' listenin'. I owe my
life to him, an' so does every other one of the hundred. Shore enough
the Cheyennes come, ridin' right on the edge of the blizzard, an' in
all that terrible storm they tried to rush us. But we'd been warned by
Palmer an' we beat 'em off at last, though a lot of good men bit the
snow. I say again, sir, that you can't ever be too careful in war.
Do everything you can think of, and then think of some more. I wish
Mr. Shepard would come!"

They continued to walk back and forth, in front of the lines, and,
at times, they were accompanied by Colonel Winchester or Warner or
Pennington. The colonel fully shared the sergeant's anxieties. The fact
that most of the Union army was asleep in the tents alarmed him, and the
great fog added to his uneasiness. It came now in heavy drifts like
clouds sweeping down the valley, and he did not know what was in the
heart of it. The pickets had been sent far forward, but the vast moving
column of heavy whitish vapor hid everything from their eyes, too,
save a circle of