He chose the latter, and after an almost perilous ride, for more than one raw sentinel took him for a rebel army and wanted to shoot, he reached the broad thoroughfare about a quarter of three, to find it still blocked by troops of the same general who had made the mistaken move on Blackburn's Ford, who was ordered to have his division on the road to the stone bridge and well out of the way two hours before,--the same fellows that "broke ranks at every blackberry-bush and spring and well along the route from Washington," and before the first crash of the shells on Thursday afternoon. Now they seemed to be lost in the darkness when routed out at midnight, and not until long after the proper time--three hours at least--could the guns of Hunter's division get the road; not until nearly dawn did they cross that old suspension bridge across Cub Run and then, turning to the right, march off into the fields along that guarded wood path. Not until broad daylight did the head of column reach the farm bridge. Then, as the sun came up hot and strong, and Snipe, after a long night in saddle, was able to rejoin his anxiously waiting major, and Stark's battalion fell in once more with the left wing of the New-Englanders and followed in the wake of Burnside's Rhode Island battery, the long column moved on, snake-like, through fields wherein the dew too soon gave way to dust, and not until nine o'clock, heated, weary, hungry, after nine hours of exasperating delays, of alternate halt and march, were the leading files plashing through Sudley Ford. There stood the little church, and this was Sunday morning, and these silent, solemn fellows who came plodding up the southern bank on the trail of the gun-wheels were of the old Puritan stock, but there was no halt or time for worship. McDowell himself, commander of the army, had accompanied the turning column that by this long, circuitous path had essayed to make safe crossing of Bull Run and bear down on the rebel left, while the rest of the army waited in front of the stone bridge. Only twenty-eight thousand men all told, with twenty-nine guns and a single battalion of cavalry, had the Union general with which to assault in their chosen position thirty-two thousand enthusiastic Southerners with fifty-seven guns.