rs were now coming.

"What are you thinking about, Ohio?" asked Dick.

"I'm thinking how fast I'm growing old. Two years and a half in the war,
but it's twenty-five years in fact. I hadn't finished school when I left
home and here I am, a veteran of more battles than any soldiers have
fought since the days of old Bonaparte. If I happen to live through
this war, which I mean to do, I wonder how I'll ever settle down at home
again. Father will say to me: 'Get the plough and break up the five-acre
field for corn,' and me, maybe a veteran of a dozen pitched battles in
every one of which anywhere from one hundred thousand to two hundred
thousand men have been engaged, not to mention fifty or a hundred
smaller battles and four or five hundred skirmishes.

"When the flies begin to buzz around me I'll think they make a mighty
poor noise compared with the roar of three or four hundred big cannon
and a hundred thousand rifles that I've listened to so often. If a
yellow jacket should sting me, I'd say what a little thing it is,
compared with the piece of shrapnel that hit me at some battle not yet
fought. Maybe I'd find things so quiet I just couldn't stand it. Wars
are mighty unsettling."

"I'm thinking," said Dick, "that before this war is over all of us will
get enough of it to last a lifetime. We've got the edge on 'em now,
since Vicksburg and Gettysburg, but the Graybacks are not yet beaten by
a long shot. We've heard how Lee drew off from Gettysburg carrying all
his guns and supplies, and even with Gettysburg we haven't been doing so
well in the East as we have in the West. You know that, Ohio?"

"Of course, I do. But I think the Johnnies have made their high-water
mark. Great work our army did down there at Vicksburg, and we'll have
the chance to do just as well against Bragg. We'll defeat him, of
course. Now, Mason, notice that light flickering on the mountain up
there!"

He pointed to the crest of a ridge two or three miles away, where Dick
saw a point of flame appearing and reappearing, and answered by another
point farther down, which flickered in the same manner.

"Signals of some kind, I suppose," replied Dick, "but I don't know who
makes them or what they mean."

"I don't know what they mean, either," said Ohio; "but I can guess
pretty well who's making them. That's Slade."

"Slade!" said Dick.

"Yes, you seem to have heard of him?"

"So I have, and I've seen him, also. I heard, too, that he was up here