The Confederates, in ragged uniforms of butternut jeans, were squatted in a clump of pawpaw bushes on the edge of a stretch of ploughed ground. From the woods on the far side of the field Yankee skirmishers were shooting toward them. A shell from the batteries must have fallen nearby and set fire to the dried leaves and the fallen brush, for the smoke kept blowing in a fellow's face, choking him and making him cough. Captain Tip Meldrum, the commander of Company B, was just behind the men, giving the order to fire back. High Private Billy Priest aimed his musket at the thickets where the Yankees were hidden and pulled the trigger, but the cap on the nipple of his piece was defective or something, and the charge wouldn't explode. “Fire! Fire! Fire!” yelled Captain Tip Meldrum over and over again, and then he yanked out his own horse-pistol and emptied it into the hostile timber. But Private Priest's gun still balked. He flung it down--and found himself sitting up in bed, gasping. The dream hadn't been altogether a dream at that. For there was indeed smoke in the judge's eyes and his nostrils--plenty of it. A revolver was cracking out its shots somewhere near at hand; somebody outside his window was shrieking “Fire!” at the top of a good strong voice. In the distance other voices were taking up the cry. In an earlier day, when a fire started in town, the man who discovered it drew his pistol if he were on the highway, or snatched it up if he chanced to be at home, and pointing its barrel at the sky emptied it into the air as fast as the cylinder would turn. The man next door followed suit and so on until volleys were rattling all over the neighbourhood. Thus were the townspeople aroused and, along with the townspeople, the members of the volunteer fire department. Now we had a paid department and a regular electric-alarm system, predicated on boxes and gongs and wires and things; but in outlying districts the pistol-shooting fashion of spreading the word still prevailed to a considerable extent, and more especially did it prevail at nighttime. So it didn't take the late dreamer longer than the shake of a sheep's tail to separate what was fancy from what was reality.