vil!" scowled Dan, "who's a popinjay?"

"Wall, I'd like a pair of good stout breeches," peacefully interposed
Pinetop. "I've been backin' up agin the fence when I seed a lady comin' for
the last three weeks, an' whenever I set down, I'm plum feared to git up
agin. What with all the other things,--the Yankees, and the chills, and the
measles,--it's downright hard on a man to have to be a-feared of his own
breeches."

Dan looked round with sympathy. "That's true; it's a shame," he admitted
smiling. "Look here, boys, has anybody got an extra pair of breeches?"

A howl of derision went up from the regiment as it fell into ranks.

"Has anybody got a few grape-leaves to spare?" it demanded in a high
chorus.

"Oh, shut up," responded Dan promptly. "Come on, Pinetop, we'll clothe
ourselves to-morrow."

The brigade formed and swung off rapidly along the road, where the dust lay
like gauze upon the sunshine. At the end of a mile somebody stopped and
cried out excitedly. "Look here, boys, the persimmons on that tree over
thar are gittin' 'mos fit to eat. I can see 'em turnin'," and with the
words the column scattered like chaff across the field. But the first man
to reach the tree came back with a wry face, and fell to swearing at "the
darn fool who could eat persimmons before frost."

"Thar's a tree in my yard that gits ripe about September," remarked
Pinetop, as he returned dejectedly across the waste. "Ma she begins to dry
'em 'fo' the frost sets in."

"Oh, well, we'll get a square meal in the morning," responded Dan, growing
cheerful as he dreamed of hospitable Maryland.

Some hours later, in the warm dusk, they went into bivouac among the trees,
and, in a little while, the campfires made a red glow upon the twilight.

Pinetop, with a wooden bucket on his arm, had plunged off in search of
water, and Dan and Jack Powell were sent, in the interests of the mess, to
forage through the surrounding country.

"There's a fat farmer about ten miles down, I saw him," remarked a lazy
smoker, by way of polite suggestion.

"Ten miles? Well, of all the confounded impudence," retorted Jack, as he
strolled off with Dan into the darkness.

For a time they walked in silence, depressed by hunger and the exhaustion
of the march; then Dan broke into a whistle, and presently they found
themselves walking in step with the merry air.

"Where are your thoughts, Beau?" asked Jack suddenly, turning to look at
him by the faint starlight.