In the hot June dusk, in the small town of Liberty, twenty-five miles from Lynchburg, they found his rear guard. Ramseur charged and drove it through the place and out and on into the night. There sprang a sudden shriek of shells, rear guard joining main body, and the batteries opening on the grey, heard coming up in the night. The grey line halted; grey and blue, alike exhausted with much and sore travel, fell upon the warm earth and slept as they had been dead, through the short summer night. Grey was in column as the candles of heaven were going out—on before them they heard the blue striking the flints on the Liberty and Salem turnpike. The sun came up hot and glorious. Full before the column rose the Blue Ridge. The men, moving in a huge dust cloud, talked only between times. “Hunter’s a swift Hunter or he wants to get away mighty bad! ‘Burner’ Hunter!”—“I could get right hot of heart—but what’s the use?”—“I don’t bother about the use. You’ve got to have a heart like a hot coal sometimes, with everything blowing upon it!”—“That’s so! Life’s right tragic.”—_Press forward, men!_—“Peaks of Otter! Boys from hereabouts say there’s an awful fine view from the top.”—“Awful fine view? Should think there was! When you’re up there—if you go alone—you feel like you’re halfway upstairs to God! Don’t do to go with anybody—they make a fuss and enjoy it.”—“We’re going straight into the mountains.”—“Yes, straight into the mountains. Thunder Run Mountain’s over there.” The road was now a climbing road. The column moved upon it like a gleaming dragon—the head in thick woods lifting toward the heights, the rear far back in the rolling green land just north of Liberty. The Golden Brigade was near the head. The Sixty-fifth felt the world climb beneath its feet. Allan and Billy were thinking of Thunder Run; Matthew Coffin was thinking of the pale blue letter-paper girl. Allan’s vision was now the toll-gate and now the school-house, and now, and at last persistently, the road up Thunder Run Mountain and Christianna Maydew walking on it. Blended with this vision of the road was a vision of the hospital in Richmond after Gaines’s Mill. He lay again on a blanket on the floor in a corner of the ward, thirsty and in pain, with closed eyes, and Christianna came and knelt and gave him water.... The road climbed steeply. Above ran on to the sky long, wooded, purple slopes. At one point showed a break, a “gap.” “That’s where we ’re going! That’s Buford’s Gap!” On and on and up and up—_Halt!_ rang out from the head of the column, and _Halt!—Halt!—Halt!_ ran from segment to segment of the mounting length.