So sure was he that the road before him was clear, and he was in such good spirits from the consideration that the “foot cavalry” would hurry incontinently after Hunter, that he quite capered along the road that now climbed toward Buford’s Gap. It was afternoon, warm, with a golden light. And then, suddenly, being almost in the gap, he observed something which gave him pause. It was nothing more or less than trees cut away from a rocky height overhanging the gorge through which passed the road, and some metal bores projecting from the ledges. Steve’s breath came whistlingly. “Gawd! Yankee battery!” In a moment he saw another, perched on a further ledge and masked by pine boughs. Steve panted. “Avalanche! Another minute ’n’ they’d ha’ seen me.” He was already deep in the woods beside the road, his face now turned quite away from his projected path. Indeed, when he came to himself he found that he was moving southward, and due, if he kept on, to meet that dust cloud and the Second Corps. His heart beating violently, he drew up beneath a hemlock, the vast brown trunk and a mile or so of blue air between him and the cannon-fringed crags. Here he slid down upon the scented earth and fell to thinking, his hand automatically beating to death with a small stick a broken-winged moth creeping over the needles. Steve thought at first with a countenance of blankness, and then with a strange, watery smile. His eyes lengthened and narrowed, his lips widened. “I got an idea,” he whispered. “Make ’em like me.” Sitting there he rolled up his trouser leg, removed a rotten shoe and ragged sock, then took a knife from his pocket and after a shiver of apprehension scraped and abraded an old, small wound and sore until it bled afresh. Out of his pocket he took a roll of dirty bandage kept against just such an emergency as this. Having first carefully stained it with blood, he rolled it around foot and shin, pinned it with a rusty pin, donned again sock and shoe, stood up and gave three minutes to the practice of an alternate limp and shuffle. This over he broke and trimmed a young dogwood for a staff, and with it in hand he went southward a considerable distance through the woods, then crossed to the road. Behind him, a good long way off, showed the gap where was planted the “avalanche.” Before him came rolling the road from Liberty. The dust cloud on it was rapidly growing larger. Steve, leaning heavily on his stick, limped to meet it. Cavalry ahead took his news, halted and sent back to Jubal Early. That commander spurred forward. “‘Avalanche?’ What d’ye mean? Guns? Where? Up there? — — ——! All right. Two can play at that game—_Battery forward!_”