“I can't stop!” cried Dan, groping in the darkness, then he fell heavily upon the damp ground, while a voice down the road began shouting, “Detail for guard!” Half asleep and cursing, the men responded to their names and hurried off, and as the silence closed in, the army slept like a child upon the roadside. With the first glimmer of dawn they were on the march again, passing all day through the desolate flat country, where the women ran weeping to the doorways, and waved empty hands as they went by. Once a girl in a homespun dress, with a spray of apple blossoms in her black hair, brought out a wooden bucket filled with buttermilk and passed it along the line. “Fight to the end, boys,” she cried defiantly, “and when the end comes, keep on fighting. If you go back on Lee there's not a woman in Virginia will touch your hand.” “That's right, little gal!” shrieked a husky private. “Three cheers for Marse Robert! an' we'll whip the earth in our bar' feet befo' breakfast.” “All the same I wish old Stonewall was along,” muttered Pinetop. “If I could jest see old Stonewall or his ghost ahead, I'd know thar was an open road somewhere that Sheridan ain't got his eye on.” As the sun rose high, refugees from Richmond flocked after them to shout that the town had been fired by the citizens, who had moved, with their families, to the Capitol Square as the flames spread from the great tobacco warehouses. Men who had wives and children in the city groaned as they marched farther from the ashes of their homes, and more than one staggered back into the ranks and went onward under a heavier burden. “Wall, I reckon things are fur the best--or they ain't.” remarked Pinetop, in a cheerful tone. “Thar's no goin' agin that, you bet. What's the row back thar, I wonder?” The hovering enemy, grown bolder, had fallen upon the flank, and the stragglers and the rear guard were beating off the cavalry, when a regiment was sent back to relieve the pressure. Returning, Pinetop, who was of the attacking party, fell gravely to moralizing upon the scarcity of food. “I've tasted every plagued thing that grows in this country except dirt,” he observed, “an' I'm goin' to kneel down presently and take a good square mouthful of that.” “That's one thing we shan't run short of,” replied Dan, stepping round a mud hole. “By George, we've got to march in a square again across this open. I believe when I set out for heaven, I'll find some of those confounded Yankee troopers watching the road.”