Between two and three o’clock some slight traffic began upon the road. A farm-gate opened to let out a great empty wagon and a half-grown boy with a whip over his shoulder. The horses turned their heads westward. Stafford, rising from a rock-pile, asked a lift, and the boy gave it. All rattled westward over the macadam road. The boy talked of the battle of last month—the great battle in Pennsylvania. “Didn’t we give them hell—oh, didn’t we give them hell? They saw we killed twenty thousand!” “Twenty thousand.... It is not, after all, strange that we deduced a hell.... How fresh the morning smells!” Horses, wagon, and boy were but going from one farm to another. Two miles farther on Stafford thanked the youngster and left this convoy. Light was gathering in the east. He was now met or overtaken and passed by a fair number of conveyances. In some there were soldiers; others held clusters of loudly talking or laughing men. A company of troopers passed, giants in the half-light. He concluded that he must be near an encampment, and as he walked he debated the propriety of turning from the road and making his way through woods or behind the screen of hills. Men on horseback, in passing, spoke to him. At last, as the cocks were crowing, he did turn from the road. The lane in which he found himself wound narrowly between dew-heavy berry-bushes and an arch of locust trees. Branch and twig and leaf of these made a wonderful fretted arch through which to view the carnation morning sky. Ripe berries hung upon the bushes. Stafford was hungry and he gathered these and ate. A bird began to sing, sweet, sweet! Holding by the stem of a young persimmon he planted his foot in the moist earth of the bank, and climbed upward to where the berries grew thickest. Briar and elder and young locust closed around him. Above the bird sang piercingly, and behind it showed the purple sky. The dewy coolness was divine. His head was swimming a little with fatigue and hunger, but he was light-hearted, with a curious, untroubled sense of identity with the purple sky, the locust tree, the singing bird, even with the spray of berries his hand was closing on. The bird stopped singing and flew away. A horse neighed, the lane filled with the sound of feet. Stafford saw between the bushes the blue moving forms. He crouched amid the dimness of elder and blackberry, not knowing if he were well hidden, but hoping for the best. The company, pickets relieved and moving toward an encampment, had well-nigh passed when one keen-eyed man observed some slight movement, some overbending of the wayside growth. With his rifle barrel he parted the green curtain.