She rode along the fence until she came to an opening which led into what appeared in the darkness to be another cotton field, but proved to be a worn-out one, long ago abandoned to the rank-growing briars, which clung to and tore her skirts, and seamed the mare's delicate skin with bleeding furrows. The flinching brute pressed onward, in response to her mistress's encouragement, but the progress was grievously slow. Presently Rachel began to see moving figures a little way ahead of her, and hear voices in command. She eralized that she was approaching the forces moving to the attack on the Union right. There was something grotesque, weird, even frightful in the sounds and the aspect of the moving masses and figures, but she at last made out that they were batteries, regiments and mounted men. She decided that her best course was to mingle with and move along with them, until she could get a chance to ride away in advance. For hours that seemed weeks she remained entangled in the slow-moving mass, whose bewildering vagaries of motion were as trying to the endurance of her steed as they were exasperating to her own impatience. Occasionally she caught glimpses of the Union camp-fires in the distance, that, low and smoldering, told of the waning night, and she would look anxiously over her left shoulder for a hint of the coming of the dreaded dawn. Her mare terrified her with symptoms of giving out. At last she saw an unmistakable silvery break in the eastern clouds. Half-frantic she broke suddenly out of the throng by an abrupt turn to the right, and lashing her mare savagely, galloped where a graying in the dense darkness showed an opening between two cedar thickets, that led to the picket-fires, half a mile away. The mare's hoofs beat sonorously on the level limestone floor, which there frequently rises through the shallow soil and starves out the cedar. “Halt! Go back,” commanded a hoarse voice in front of her, which was accompanied with the clicking of a gunlock. “Ye can't pass heah.” “Lemme pass, Mister,” she pleaded. “I'm on'y a gal, with medicine fur my mammy, an' I'm powerful anxious ter git home.” “No, ye can't git out heah. Orders are strict; besides, ef ye did the Yankees 'd cotch ye. They're jest out thar.”