a range that seemed to melt into a wide
plateau fringed deeply with scrub-oak and clusters of pine. Jack had
provided himself with a field-glass. Standing in the middle of the
Warrenton pike, a fine highway, that ran downward as solid as a Roman
causeway, for four or five miles, he could see the break made by the
Bull Run River, and--yes, by the glaive of battle!--he could see the
glistening of bayonets now and then, where the screen of woods
grew thinner.

The general, too, was examining the distant lines, and Jack took it as a
good omen that Sherman grew jocose and appeared to be making merry with
Tyler, whose face looked troubled, now that the decisive moment seemed
at hand. But the day passed, and there was no advance. It was not until
late in the evening that the cause became known. The army had been
waiting for supplies, ammunition, and what not, that should have been on
the field the day before. The Caribees were made frantic, too, by what
seemed a battle going on to the south of them, a few miles to the left.
The camp that night was a grand debating society, every man propounding
a theory of strategy that would have edified General McDowell, no doubt,
if he could have been given a _precis_ of the whole. How such things
become known it is difficult to guess, but every man in the columns knew
that the general had planned to put forward his thirty thousand men in
the form of a half-moon, covering about ten miles from tip to tip. The
right or northward horn was to be considerably thicker and of more body
than the left or southern. When the time came this right was to curve in
like a hook and cut the ground out from the left wing of the rebel army.

This is the homely way these unscientific strategists made the movement
known to each other, and it very aptly describes the formulated plan of
battle, save that, of course, there were gaps between the forces here
and there along this human crescent. Long before daylight Sherman's
brigade, with a battery of guns and a squadron of cavalry, set out due
south, leaving the broad Warrenton pike far to their right hand. Such a
country as the march led into, no one had ever seen in the North outside
of mountain regions--deep gullies; wastes of gnarled and aggressive
oaks, that tore clothes and flesh in the passage; sudden hillocks rising
conical and inconsequent every few rods; deep chasms conducting driblets
of water; morasses covered with dark and stagnant pools, where the
pi