"No bullet holes in 'em yet, to speak of, I notice," he remarked to the sergeant, raising a clear, sharp young voice above the universal racket. "Guess you'll get enough to-day to make up!" he added. The old sergeant nodded his head. "Something besides flags will get holes in 'em, too," he returned, lifting his voice also, like a man talking in the teeth of a roaring gale. "What are you? Michiganders?" shouted the boy. "No--Ohio!" the sergeant bawled back. "When they changed the corps, they brigaded us all up fresh, so that we don't know our own mothers. We've got in with some New Yorkers that ain't got no more sense than to chew fine-cut tobacco. You can't raise a plug in a whole regiment of 'em. Regular pumpkin-heads!" "They'll show you fellows the way, down below there, though!" retorted the boy, his injured state pride adding shrillness to his tone. "Ohio's no good, anyhow!" He instinctively moved beyond reach of the sergeant's boot, as he passed this last remark. Some of the men in the crowded ranks close by laughed at his impudence, and he himself was grinning with a sense of successful repartee, when he felt a hand laid on his shoulder. He looked up, and found himself confronting a young, fair-faced officer, who was regarding him with gravely gentle eyes. "Don't say that about any men who are going out to die," this officer said; and though he did not seem to be speaking loudly, the words fell very distinctly. "I've got a brother at home about your size. So have lots of the rest of us here. We want to carry down there with us a pleasant notion of the last boy we saw." "I was only fooling!" the drummer-boy rejoined. There was no time for further words, as the preparatory rattle on the drum-edge behind warned him. In another minute he was back in his place, and the band was hurling forth into the general uproar the strains of "The Red, White, and Blue." The column had begun to move again. The flags, the color-guard, the young officer with the sad, gentle eyes, had passed downward out of sight, and company after company of their regiment came pressing onward now. The boy, as he kept up with his part of the familiar work, watched these Ohio men swing past. They seemed young fellows, for the most part, and their uniforms were significantly new and clean. Everything about them showed that they were going under fire for the first time, though they pushed forward as stoutly as veterans. The boy found himself hoping that a good many of these Ohio men would come back all right--and most of all that young officer who had a brother about his size. All this while a group of field officers had been standing on the ridge up above the rocky mound which sheltered the band. Their figures, with broad hats and big-cuffed gauntlets, had grown indistinct against the sky as the smoke thickened. Now they gave up trying to follow through their glasses the movements in the vale below, and turned to descend.