The two moved on in silence, Cleave riding Dundee, Allan walking beside him. They were in one of the glades of the Wilderness, the Sixty-fifth bivouacking at hand, Cleave going to brigade headquarters and the scout joining him from some by-path. It was sunset, and a pink light touched the Wilderness. “We have come to a definite turn,” said Cleave, “or rather, we came to it at Gettysburg,—Gettysburg and Vicksburg.” He looked about him. “A year ago, we were in this Wilderness. I had a cloud upon me that I did not know would ever be lifted—a cloud upon me and a sore heart.” He lifted his hat and rode bareheaded. “But the light upon this Wilderness was more rosy then than now.” Night fell. Far and wide rolled the Wilderness. An odour rose from the dwarf pine and oak and sweet gum and cedar, from the earth and its carpet of the leaves of old years, from the dogwood, the pink azalea, and the purple judas-tree, from rotting logs and orange and red fungi, from small marshy bottoms where the frogs were croaking, from the dry, out-worn “poison fields,” from dust and from mould,—a subtle odour, new as to-day, old as sandalwood cut in the East ten thousand years ago. Far and wide stretched the Wilderness. Its ravines were not deep, its hills were not high, but it had a vastness as of the desert, where, neither, are the ravines deep nor the hills high. The stars rimmed it, and a low whispering wind went from cedar covert to sweet-gum copse, from pine to oak, from dogwood to judas-tree. It lifted the dust from the narrow, trampled, hidden roads and powdered with it the wayside growth. It murmured past the Tabernacle Church, and the burned house of Chancellorsville, and Dowdall’s Tavern and the old Wilderness Tavern, by Catherine Furnace and along the old Turnpike and the Plank Road. It bore with it the usual sounds of the Wilderness by night and it bore also, this May as last May, the hum of great armies, not roused yet, not furiously battling, but murmurous—a dreamy, not unrestful sound adding itself to the region’s natural voice. A group of officers, sitting by the embers of a camp-fire, listened to the two voices, and watched the pale light along the northern horizon. “It’s like the lights of a distant city over there.” “A hundred and forty thousand men make a city.... Not so distant either.” “Grant! I never met him in the old Mexican days,—nor afterwards. He went pretty far down. But I have met a man or two who knew him, and they liked him—a bulldog, reticent, tenacious kind of person—” “Very good soldierly qualities—especially when backed by one hundred and forty thousand men with promise of all reinforcements needed!—Heigho!” “He had a kind of rough chivalry, also,—consideration, simplicity. Sincere, too—” He stirred the embers with his scabbard point. “Well! we’ve got a job before us now.” “We’ve won, once before, in this place.”