Putting my ear to the ice, I heard the scraping of Crothers's hobnails not fifteen feet away. I was sure that I was making no mistake this time, and I speedily overhauled him, to find that it was the real Crothers. He coincided with my view that it would be better to withdraw, like the King of France of the ancient rhyme, and try again. He gave a whistle which may have been a part of the Confederate set of signals, though I don't know, and in a few minutes our entire army had retreated and reassembled at our own hut, casualties none, and the enemy still in possession of his defences. As we had satisfactory proof that the colonel was vigilant, we decided to end the military operations for that night and devote what was left of it to keeping warm. The hut was occupied by Miss Hetherill, whom the doctor reported to be in a sound slumber and doing well. As all the space under shelter was necessarily reserved for the lady, we decided to build a big fire near the hut and sit around it until morning. It was a hard task, owing to the icy condition of the firewood, but we got it to going at last, and the cheerful, crackling blaze put heart in us all. We had no fear that the colonel would come out and shoot at us in the light. He was not that kind of a soldier, and, besides, his plan, as far as we could divine it, was to escape from us, not to inflict any special injury upon us. Dr. Ambrose was somewhat cast down at our failure to seize the colonel at the first attempt, but his spirits were revived presently, and when I asked him to tell me about some of the old battles in which he and the colonel and the others present except myself had fought, he became animated and time ceased to limp. An hour of this, and the doctor broke off abruptly. As Crothers and I had been in the thick of the campaign all the time, he suggested that we roll ourselves in our blankets and try to get a little sleep by the fire. We followed his advice, and in five minutes I was dead to the world and its vanities. But presently I was dragged back out of infinite depths and told to sit up and open my eyes. "Why, I have just closed them, and it was at your suggestion," I said to Crothers. "You've been asleep for the last three hours. Wake up and look at the weather." I thought the weather a trifling pretext to awake a man from such pleasant slumbers, but when I looked about I saw better. The air had turned much warmer. There was a smack of wet in it, which to an experienced man was certain proof of snow to come, and more of it, too, than the thin skim of the day before. Even in the skies, naturally dark from the night, we could see heavy masses of clouds rolling. "It will begin inside of a half-hour," said Dr. Ambrose. "And a snow-storm in the mountains is no light matter, doctor," I said. "Certainly not."