these scenes are supposed
to have taken place in 1863. The only airships then were those the
inventors were dreaming about or making in their laboratories. No
airships in Civil War plays! I guess not! Balloons, maybe, but no
airships."

"More fighting! Camera!" called Mr. Pertell, and again the spirited
action was under way. Cannon boomed; rifles spat fire and smoke; men
fought hand to hand, often rolling over dead; riderless horses dashed
here and there. Now and then a man would narrowly escape being run down.
As it was, several were burned from being too near the cannon or the
guns, and one man's leg was broken in a fall from his horse.

But it was part of the game, and no one seemed to mind. A real hospital
was set up at Oak Farm, not a mere shell of a building, and here the
injured, as well as those who simulated injury, were attended.

Ruth and some of the women made up as nurses, though this was not the
big scene in which Ruth and Alice were to take part.

"Confederates retreat!" directed Mr. Pertell, and the Southern forces,
having been defeated, were forced to withdraw. Their attempt to
recapture their town had failed.

"Whew! that was hot work!" cried Paul, as he came back to the farmhouse,
having played his part as a Confederate soldier.

"It certainly was," agreed Mr. DeVere, who had been the directing Union
General. Now that the "war" was over Northerners and Southerners mingled
together in friendly converse, their differences forgotten.

"I just can't bear the smell of powder!" complained Miss Dixon. "I wish
I had my salts."

"I'll get them for you, dear," offered Miss Pennington. "I'm going up to
our rooms." The former vaudeville actresses, with Ruth, Alice, and some
of the others, were resting on the farmhouse porch.

Miss Dixon smelled the salts and declared she felt much better.

"There's to be a dance in the village to-night," Paul remarked at the
supper table.

"Let's go!" proposed Alice. "Will you take me, Paul?"

"Of course I will."

"May I have the pleasure?" asked Russ, of Ruth.

"Why, yes, if the rest go."

"We'll all go!" chimed in Miss Dixon. "Some of the extra men are good
dancers. They proved it in the ballroom scene the other day. We can get
a man, Pearl."

"All right, my dear, just as you say."

The little party was soon arranged.

"Estelle might like to go," suggested Alice.

"I'll go to ask her," offered Ruth, for Miss Brown had quit the supper
table early and gon