other. Far away the rival Presidents at Washington
and Richmond were wondering what was happening to their armies in the
dark wilderness of Western Tennessee.

The night was more quiet than the one that had just gone before. The
booming of the cannon as regular as the tolling of funeral bells had
ceased with the darkness, but in its place the fierce winter wind had
begun to blow again. Dick, relaxed and weary after his day's work,
hovered over one of the fires and was grateful for the warmth. He
had trodden miles through slush and snow and frozen earth, and he was
plastered to the waist with frozen mud, which now began to soften and
fall off before the coals.

Warner, who had been on active duty, too, also sank to rest with a sigh
of relief.

"It's battle tomorrow, Dick," he said, "and I don't care. As it didn't
come off today the chances are at least eighty per cent that it will
happen the next day. You say that when you were lying in the snow last
night, Dick, you saw your uncle and that he's a colonel in the rebel
army. It's queer."

"You're wrong, George, it isn't queer. We're on opposite sides, serving
at the same place, and it's natural that we should meet some time or
other. Oh, I tell you, you fellows from the New England and the other
Northern States don't appreciate the sacrifices that we of the border
states make for the Union. Up there you are safe from invasion. Your
houses are not on the battlefields. You are all on one side. You don't
have to fight against your own kind, the people you hold most dear.
And when the war is over, whether we win or lose, you'll go back to
unravaged regions."

"You wrong me there, Dick. I have thought of it. It's the people of the
border, whether North or South, who pay the biggest price. We risk our
lives, but you risk your lives also, and everything else, too."

Dick wrapped himself in a heavy blanket, pillowed his head on a log
before one of the fires and dozed a while. His nerves had been tried too
hard to permit of easy sleep. He awoke now and then and over a wide area
saw the sinking fires and the moving forms of men. He felt that a
sense of uneasiness pervaded the officers. He knew that many of them
considered their forces inadequate for the siege of a fortress defended
by a large army, but he felt with the sincerity of conviction also, that
Grant would never withdraw.

He heard from Colonel Winchester about midnight in one of his wakeful
intervals that Genera