Yeates and the Catawba ahead, the women and
Dick in the midst, and her Apostolic Majesty's late captain of hussars,
masquerading as a British trooper, to bring on the rear.

Once in motion beneath the blue-black shadows of the pines, I quickly
lost all sense of direction. After we had ridden in wordless silence a
short half hour or less, and I supposed we should be nearing the head
of our descending ravine, our little cavalcade was halted suddenly in a
thickset grove of the pines, and Ephraim Yeates appeared at my stirrup
to say:

"H'ist ye off your nag, Cap'n John, and let's take a far'well squinch at
the inimy whilst we can."

"Where? what enemy?" I would ask, slipping from the saddle at his word.

"Why, the hoss-captain's varmints, to be sure; or what-all the
abomination o' desolation has left of 'em. We ain't more than a cat's
jump from the edge o' the big rock where we first sot eyes on 'em this
morning."

I saw not what was to be gained by any such long-range espial in the
darkness. None the less, I followed the old man to the cliff's edge. He
was wiser in his forecastings than I was in mine. There was a thing to
look at, and light enough to see it by. One of the missile stones, it
seems, had crashed into the great fire, scattering the brands in all
directions. The pine-bough troop shelters were ablaze, and creeping
serpents of fire were worming their way hither and yon over the year-old
leaf beds in the wood. Ever and anon some pine sapling in the path of
these fiery serpents would go up in a torch-like flare; and so, as I
say, there was light enough.

What we looked down upon was not inaptly pictured out by Ephraim
Yeates's Scripture phrase, the abomination of desolation. Every vestige
of the camp save the glowing skeletons of the troop shelters had
disappeared, and the swarded savanna was become a blackened chaos-blot
on the fair woodland scene. I have said that the powder-sheltering
boulder was a cliff for size; the mighty upheaval of the explosion had
toppled it in ruins into the stream, and huge fragments the bigness of a
wine-butt had been hurled with the storm of lighter debris broadcast
upon the camp.

At first we saw no sign of life in all the firelit space. But a moment
later, when three or four of the sapling torches blazed up together, we
made out some half dozen figures of human beings--whether red or white
we could not tell--stumbling and reeling about among the rocks like
blind men drunke