that I had been too careless, and that some
one had seen me. However, I lay down to sleep, for I was dead tired,
and we had a splendid hiding-place in the thick bush.

I do not know how long I slept; it seemed only a few minutes when a
bugle-call rang out. We wakened with a start, for it went through us
like a knife.

We heard loud commands, and knew there was a company of soldiers
somewhere near, and I gathered from my recent observations that
these sounds came from the hay meadow in front of us.

We did not connect the demonstration with our presence until the
soldiers began shouting and charging the wood where we lay. Then we
knew we were what the society papers call the "raison d'etre" for
all this celebration.

We lay close to the earth and hardly dared to breathe. The soldiers
ran shouting and firing (probably blank cartridges) in every
direction. Through the brush I saw their feet as they passed--not
ten feet from where we lay.

The noise they made was deafening; evidently they thought if they
beat the bushes sufficiently hard, they could scare us out like
rabbits, and I knew they were watching the paths and thin places
in the woods. But we lay tight, knowing it was our only safety.

Soon the noise grew fainter, and they passed on to try the woods we
had just come through, and we, worn with fatigue, fell asleep.

In the afternoon they gave our woods another combing. They seemed
pretty sure we were somewhere near! But they did not come quite so
close to us as they had in the morning.

However, we had heard enough to convince us that this was a poor
place to linger, and when it got real dark, we pushed on south across
the hay meadow. This meadow was full of ditches which were a little
too wide to jump and were too skwudgy in the bottom to make wading
pleasant. They delayed us and tired us a great deal, for it was a
tough climb getting out of them.

At last we decided to take the road, for the night was dark enough to
hide us, and by going slowly we thought we could avoid running into
any one.

We had not gone very far when we heard the sound of wagons, and when
we stopped to listen we could hear many voices, and knew our road was
bringing us to a much-used thoroughfare. In the corner formed by the
intersecting roads there was a thick bush of probably ten acres, and
I could not resist the desire to scout and see what sort of country
we were in. So I left Bromley, carefully marking where he was by all
t