Billy Maydew, rising from the wet earth at four o’clock, found that the rain was coming down and the world was wrapped in fog. “Thunder Run Mountain can’t see Peaks of Otter this morning!” he said. He stood up, tall and lean and twenty-one, and stretched himself. “Hope grandpap and the dawgs air setting comfortable by the fire!” Certainly the Stonewall Brigade, Johnson’s division, Ewell’s corps, was not warm and comfortable. Felled wet trees did as well for breastwork and traverse and abatis as dry, but they were not so good for camp-fires. The fires this streaming break-of-day were a farce. The ground behind the breastworks was rough and now very muddy, and the great number of stumps of trees had a dismal look. Where a fire was kindled the smoke refused to rise, but clung dark, thick, and suffocating. The air struck shiveringly cold, and the woods north and east and west of the sharp salient were as invisible as a fog-mantled coast. Billy, standing high in the angle’s narrowest part, had a curious feeling. He had never been on a ship or he might have thought, “I am driving fast into something behind that fog.” As it was, he shook off the slight dizziness and looked about him—at the thronged deck where everybody was trying to get breakfast, at the long trenches, each side of the salient and rounding the point, at the log and earth breastworks and the short traverses, at the abatis of felled trees, branches outward, much like the swirl of waves to either side the ship’s prow. He looked at the parapets where the guns had been, and then, brigade headquarters’ fire being near, he listened to an aide from the division commander. “General Johnson says, sir, that he has sent again for the guns, sent for the third time. They’re coming, but the road is frightfully heavy. He says the moment they are here, get them into position and trained. In the mean time keep the sharpest kind of lookout.” Billy had not thought much of it before, but now it came over him. “We air in a darned defenceless position out here.” He went back to where his mess was struggling with a fire not big enough to toast hard-tack. He had hardly joined them when a drum beat and an order rang the length and breadth of the salient. _Fall in!_ He was down in one of the trenches, the Sixty-fifth with him, right and left. Turning his head, he saw Cleave stand a moment looking at the platforms where the batteries had been and now were not, then walk along the trenches and speak to the men. Lieutenant Coffin he saw, too, slight, pale, romantic-looking, and troubled at the moment because he had unwittingly stepped into a mud-hole which had mired him above the knee. He had a bit of scrap iron and with it was scraping the mud away, steadying himself, shoulder against a tree.