emy's approach, and in which lay the sleeping camp for
whose security he was accountable with his life--conscious, too, of many
another awkward feature of the situation and of considerations affecting
his own safety, Private Grayrock was profoundly disquieted. Nor was he
given time to recover his tranquillity, for almost at the moment that he
realized his awkward predicament he heard a stir of leaves and a snap of
fallen twigs, and turning with a stilled heart in the direction whence
it came, saw in the gloom the indistinct outlines of a human figure.

"Halt!" shouted Private Grayrock, peremptorily as in duty bound, backing
up the command with the sharp metallic snap of his cocking rifle--"who
goes there?"

There was no answer; at least there was an instant's hesitation, and the
answer, if it came, was lost in the report of the sentinel's rifle. In
the silence of the night and the forest the sound was deafening, and
hardly had it died away when it was repeated by the pieces of the
pickets to right and left, a sympathetic fusillade. For two hours every
unconverted civilian of them had been evolving enemies from his
imagination, and peopling the woods in his front with them, and
Grayrock's shot had started the whole encroaching host into visible
existence. Having fired, all retreated, breathless, to the reserves--all
but Grayrock, who did not know in what direction to retreat. When, no
enemy appearing, the roused camp two miles away had undressed and got
itself into bed again, and the picket line was cautiously
re-established, he was discovered bravely holding his ground, and was
complimented by the officer of the guard as the one soldier of that
devoted band who could rightly be considered the moral equivalent of
that uncommon unit of value, "a whoop in hell."

In the mean time, however, Grayrock had made a close but unavailing
search for the mortal part of the intruder at whom he had fired, and
whom he had a marksman's intuitive sense of having hit; for he was one
of those born experts who shoot without aim by an instinctive sense of
direction, and are nearly as dangerous by night as by day. During a full
half of his twenty-four years he had been a terror to the targets of all
the shooting-galleries in three cities. Unable now to produce his dead
game he had the discretion to hold his tongue, and was glad to observe
in his officer and comrades the natural assumption that not having run
away he had seen nothing hostile