During the night a siege-gun had been brought up by hand, and now, from its place where the road cut through the entrenchments, it opened with the morning greeting of a hoarse bark, as the crew serving it began feeling over the landscape for the field-piece which had boomed so insistently last night. Then, as the morning wore on, and orders to advance came, the slow rifle-firing began again and increased in volume as the sun climbed. The night-long rain of random lead had taken its toll in a few wounded, though none had sustained mortal hurt. Two or three men from B Company came back to the front from the improvised dressing-station at the rear, wearing reddened bandages, which they displayed with the cocky pride of medals, as they picked up their pieces and joined again in the game. The masking woods told nothing of the trenches beyond except in the swish of Mauser bullets, which shredded drooping palm fronds into tatters. Newt Spooner was squatting on his haunches in the trench, with a pipe between his teeth. Every now and then he came to his knees and fired a shot. At his side knelt Jim Dodeman, who until he joined the militia had never fared twenty miles from the cabin on Troublesome where he had been born. Jimmy was bored with the ennui of shooting at a screen of palm trees and crouching between times in a hot ditch. So, at last, he rose for a fuller view and to stretch the cramp from his limbs. He rose silently and as silently lay down again, but this time he lay flat, and, when a pause in proceedings gave Newt leisure to relight his pipe, he looked down to recognize in Jimmy's posture the dummy-like quality of death. The little muddy spot under the soldier's temple was fed by blood trickling from his brain. First-Sergeant Peter Spooner had been going back and forth along the company line, curbing the inclination of its restive integers to over-spend cartridges in futile bickering. He stopped and turned the prostrate figure face up, and for a moment looked into the dulled eyes. "Dead," commented the sergeant briefly. Newt nodded. "Them damned Falkinses got him," he said over his shoulder. Then, remembering that he had swapped enemies, he grinned, and corrected himself: "I mean them other varmints." At noon, a brigade staff-officer brought instructions. The whole line was to be advanced five hundred yards to a new position where the woods would no longer screen the enemy, and it was there to dig trenches along a roadway, which paralleled the present front. That news sent a drone of excited pleasure through the bluegrass companies, and even into the phlegmatic stoicism of the Shirt-tail battalion crept the suppressed expectation of the first charge. Major Falkins went along the line for final instructions to company commanders, and First Sergeant Spooner cast down his company front the anxious glance of a stage-director who awaits the curtain call, on a first night.