The next sun rose fair over the green, rolling, open land, rich in half-grown crops of cotton and corn between fence-rows of persimmon and sassafras. Before it was high the eager Callenders were out on a main road. Their Mobile boy had left them and given the reins to an old man, a disabled and paroled soldier bound homeward into Vicksburg. Delays plagued them on every turn. At a cross-road they were compelled to wait for a large body of infantry, followed by its ordnance wagons, to sweep across their path with the long, swift stride of men who had marched for two years and which changed to a double-quick as they went over a hill-top. Or next they had to draw wildly aside into the zigzags of a worm-fence for a column of galloping cavalry and shroud their heads from its stifling dust while their driver hung to his mules' heads by the bits. More than once they caught from some gentle rise a backward glimpse of long thin lines puffing and crackling at each other; oftener and more and more they heard the far resound of artillery, the shuffling, clattering flight of shell, and their final peal as they reported back to the guns that had sent them; and once, when the ladies asked if a certain human note, rarefied by distance, was not the hurrahing of boys on a school-ground, the old man said no, it was "the Yanks charging." But never, moving or standing from aides or couriers spurring to front or flank, or from hobbling wounded men or unhurt stragglers footing to the rear, could they gather a word as to Brodnax's brigade or Kincaid's Battery. "Kincaid's Battery hell! You get those ladies out o' this as fast as them mules can skedaddle." By and by ambulances and then open wagons began to jolt and tilt past them full of ragged, grimy, bloody men wailing and groaning, no one heeding the entreaties of the three ladies to be taken in as nurses. Near a cross-road before them they saw on a fair farmhouse the yellow flag, and a vehicle or two at its door, yet no load of wounded turned that way. Out of it, instead, excited men were hurrying, some lamely, feebly, afoot, others at better speed on rude litters, but all rearward across the plowed land. Two women stepped out into a light trap and vanished behind a lane hedge before Constance could call the attention of her companions. "Why, Nan, if we didn't _know_ she was in New Orleans I'd stand the world down that that was Flora!"