It rose and fell in the distance to the left of the road. A turn and they came upon pickets. Followed a parley. “You two want to join your regiment, and the lady wants to get to Resaca? Resaca isn’t a big place, ma’am, and the fighting’s going to be all around it and maybe through it. Hadn’t you better—” “No, I hadn’t. My husband is Captain Cary of the ——th Virginia. I know, sir, that you are going most courteously to let me pass.” When Désirée Gaillard said “most courteously,” when she smiled and looked straight and steady with her dark eyes, it was fatal. Nothing short of positive orders to the contrary would have kept those grey pickets from letting her pass. The wagon went on, and, having pierced a skirmish line lying down waiting, came, in the dusty forenoon, to Stevenson’s division, drawn up in two lines across and on either side of the Dalton and Resaca road. An officer stopped the advance. “There’s going to be fighting here in five minutes! You shouldn’t have been let to pass the pickets. You can’t go on and you can’t go back. They’ve got their batteries planted and they’re coming out of the wood yonder.—There’s the first shell!” He looked around him. “Madam, I’ll agree that there aren’t many safe places in the Confederacy, but I wish that you were in one of them! You two men report to the sergeant there! Uncle, you drive that cart behind the hill yonder—the one next to the one with the guns on it. When you’re there, madam, you’d better lie close to the earth, behind one of those boulders. As soon as we’ve silenced their fire and the road’s clear, you can go on.—Not at all! Not at all! But it is extremely unwise for a lady to be here!”