Dan looked up into the blue sky, across the open meadows to the far-off low mountains, and then down the long turnpike where the dust hung in a yellow cloud. In the bright sunshine he saw the flash of steel and the glitter of gold braid, and the noise of tramping feet cheered him like music as he walked on gayly, filled with visions. For was he not marching to his chosen end--to victory, to Chericoke--to Betty? Or if the worst came to the worst--well, a man had but one life, after all, and a life was a little thing to give his country. Then, as always, his patriotism appealed to him as a romance rather than a religion--the fine Southern ardour which had sent him, at the first call, into the ranks, had sprung from an inward, not an outward pressure. The sound of the bugle, the fluttering of the flags, the flash of hot steel in the sunlight, the high old words that stirred men's pulses--these things were his by blood and right of heritage. He could no more have stifled the impulse that prompted him to take a side in any fight than he could have kept his heart cool beneath the impassioned voice of a Southern orator. The Major's blood ran warm through many generations. “I say, Beau, did you put a millstone in my knapsack?” inquired Bland suddenly. His face was flushed, and there was a streak of wet dust across his forehead. “If you did, it was a dirty joke,” he added irritably. Dan laughed. “Now that's odd,” he replied, “because there's one in mine also, and, moreover, somebody has stuck penknives in my boots. Was it you, Pinetop?” But the mountaineer shook his head in silence, and then, as they halted to rest upon the roadside, he flung himself down beneath the shadow of a sycamore, and raised his canteen to his lips. He had come leisurely at his long strides, and as Dan looked at him lying upon the short grass by the wall, he shook his own roughened hair, in impatient envy. “Why, you've stood it like a Major, Pinetop,” he remarked. Pinetop opened his eyes. “Stood what?” he drawled. “Why, this heat, this dust, this whole confounded march. I don't believe you've turned a hair, as Big Abel says.” “Good Lord,” said Pinetop. “I don't reckon you've ever ploughed up hill with a steer team.” Without replying, Dan unstrapped his knapsack and threw it upon the roadside. “What doesn't go in my haversack, doesn't go, that's all,” he observed. “How about you, Dandy?” “Oh, I threw mine away a mile after starting,” returned Jack Powell, “my luxuries are with a girl I left behind me. I've sacrificed everything to the cause except my toothbrush, and, by Jove, if the weight of that goes on increasing, I shall be forced to dispense with it forever. I got rid of my rations long ago. Pinetop says a man can't starve in blackberry season, and I hope he's right. Anyway, the Lord will provide--or he won't, that's certain.”