Quarters were given to them in a tent put at their disposal by the surgeons, and in the long, wakeful hours of the night Olympia heard the guard pacing monotonously before the door. The music of the bugles aroused them at sunrise--a wan, haggard group, sad-eyed and silent. The girl made desperate efforts to cheer the wretched mother, and even privily took Merry to task for giving way before what was as yet but a shadow. 'Twould be time enough for tears when they found evidence that the stout, vigorous boys had been killed. As they finished the very plain breakfast of half-baked bread, pea-coffee, and eggs, bought by the orderly at an exorbitant rate, he said, good-naturedly: "The train don't come till about ten o'clock. If you'd like to see the battle-field, I can get the ambulance and take you over." Olympia eagerly assented--anything was preferable to this mute misery of her mother and Merry's sepulchral struggles to be conversational and tearless. They drove through bewildering numbers of tents, most of them, Olympia's sharp eyes noted, marked "U.S.A.," and she reflected, almost angrily, that the chief part of war, after all, was pillage. The men looked shabby, and the uniforms were as varied as a carnival, though by no means so gay. Whenever they crossed a stream, which was not seldom, groups of men were standing in the water to their middle, washing their clothing, very much as Olympia had seen the washer-women on the Continent, in Europe. They were very merry, even boisterous in this unaccustomed work, responding to rough jests by resounding slashes of the tightly wrung garments upon the heads or backs of the unwary wags. "Why, there must be a million men here," Merry cried, as the tents stretched for miles, as far as she could see. "No; not quite a million, I reckon," the orderly said, proudly; "but we shall have a million when we march on Washington." "March on Washington!" Merry gasped, as though it was an official order she had just heard promulgated. "But--but we aren't ready yet. We--" Then she halted in dismay. Was she giving information to the enemy? Would they instantly make use of it? Ah! she must, at any cost, undo this fatal treason, big with disaster to the republic. "I mean we are not ready yet to put our many million men on the march." The orderly laughed. "I reckon your many million will be ready as soon as our one million. You know we have a big country to cover with them. You folks have only Washington to guard and Richmond to take. We have the Mississippi and fifteen hundred miles of coast to guard. Now, this corner is Newmarket, where Johnston waited for his troops on Sunday and led them right along the road we are on--to the pine wood yonder--just north of us. We won't go through there, because we ain't making a flank movement," and he laughed pleasantly. They drove on at a rapid rate as they came upon the southern shelf of the Manassas plateau.