The howitzer came slowly up from halfway to China, the Napoleon followed, infantry encouraging. “You’ve trained your mules quick! That gun came from the Tredegar, didn’t it? Artillery’s a mighty no-account arm, but you sort of somehow grow fond of it—” “Aren’t you all Virginia?” “Yes; ——th Virginia. Aren’t you all—” “Of course we are! Botetourt. Anderson’s battery.—What’s the matter, Plecker?” “Firing ahead, sir, and those negroes are getting ready to stampede—” There broke and increased a wild night-time sputter of minies. Panic took the chance medley of negroes. They sprang from the horses, paid no heed to appeal or threat, twisted themselves from clutching hands, and vanished into darkness. Artillery, infantry helping, got the guns on somehow. Amid a _zip_—_zip_—_zip_ of minies both arms came to a grey breastwork where Stephen D. Lee was walking up and down behind a battery already placed. The dull light and rattle of skirmishes in the night died away. With it died, too, the rain. The dawn came spectrally, with a mist over McNutt’s Lake. One of Sherman’s division commanders had received orders to bridge this water during the night. Over the mournful, water-logged land the pontoons were brought from the Yazoo. Standing in the chill water, under the sweep of rain the blue engineers and their men worked courageously away, but when dawn came the pale light discovered the fact that they had not bridged the lake at all, but merely a dim, Briareus arm of the bayou, wandering off into the forest. They took up the pontoons, moved down the shore to the widening of the water, and tried again. But now the water was too wide. There were not boats enough, and while they were making a raft, the wood across McNutt’s filled with men, grey as the dawn. Tawny-red broke the flames from the sharpshooters’ rifles. A well-placed Confederate battery began, too, to talk, and the lake was not bridged. Barton’s brigade had come down to occupy the wood. When the bridge builders were driven away, it fell back to the high ground crested with slight works, seamed with rifle-pits, where were Vaughn and Gregg and Stephen D. Lee. Across the bayou the blue began to mass. There was a strip of corduroy road, a meagre bridge spanning the main bayou, then a narrow encumbered front, muck and mire and cypress stumps, and all the felled trees thrown into a grey abatis. The blue had as many divisions as the grey had brigades, but the grey position was very strong. On came the dull, December day,—raw, cold, with a lowering sky.