The captain was in the road. He walked over and leaned on the splintered fence and watched the red lights of a hundred little fires play ghostly games with black shadows in the foliage of the woods. Men were pushing about in the corn, rustling the blades. The stars were out, the young moon setting slim and lovely with the old moon on her arm. The distant crackle of rifles, belated fragments of the battle, seemed futile, isolated, mistaken and sad in the light of the drooping, withdrawing moon. Fifty feet away was a large camp-fire of fence rails. Of the men about it, one had lean, long limbs and face, wore a long black coat and black slouched hat, and talked continuously in solemn, flowing bass. The rest listened, absorbed. Now and then one of them laughed. The captain drew near. The lean talker unfolded his legs and rose. "Gods! The anchorite? Gentlemen, who might this be?" "Cap'n Windham, Company B," said some one. "He hath grown a beard! In complete steel, revisits the glimpses of the moon! A Hotspur of the North, will kill him six or seven dozen Confederates before breakfast and say, 'Fie on this quiet life!' Will tootle a reed no more! Will dive into the bottom of the deep, pluck up drowned honor by the locks, and call it vanity! Vat for a fool of a musician!" "How are you, Jack?" "A war correspondent I, John Roland Mavering, who will celebrate you, a Homer to Achilles, who wants to know for his invocation how you happen not to be dead." They locked arms and sauntered along the road in leisurely pursuit of the moon. Chapter XIII In Which Appears a General of Division, and One of "the Brethren." If Gard entered the war, as he claimed, in the theory of a spiritual adventure, it must be hinted that he had sometimes lost sight of his theory. Outside events had shown a tendency to usurp and absorb in the process of the happening. It was not so noticeable during the first nine months. He marched, drilled, felt the rain and the cold wind at night in the open, heard the enemy's guns, saw bleeding men carried by from the distant field, and shared in what was called "the defence of Washington," a matter that did not seem difficult or exciting beyond reason. He was made a sergeant--a purely outside event. There was leisure to watch the scene, to keep one's poise, to experiment with existence. If at times his old sense of separateness, of isolation among objects, scenes, and persons whose importance to him was only in their inner effect upon him--if this sense at times seemed less vivid than before, and the movements of men in masses, the common enthusiasms, made him feel that his solitary journeying was in some mystical way accompanied by watching myriads with the same forward step and shadowy goal, it was rather a passing, a recurrent sensation.