“Naw, suh, Marse Plunkett, he's fur de Un'on, but he's pow'ful feared er de Yankees,” he returned.
Bland broke into a laugh. “Oh, come, that's downright treason,” he protested merrily. “Your Marse Plunkett's a skulker sure enough, and you may tell him so with my compliments. You're on the Yankee side, too, I reckon, and there're bullets in these pies, sure as I live.”
The old man shuffled nervously on his bare feet.
“Go 'way, Marster, w'at I know 'bout 'sides'?” he replied, tilting his keg to drain the last few drops into the canteen of a thirsty soldier. “I'se on de Lawd's side, dat's whar I is.”
He fell back startled, for the call of “Column, forward!” was shouted down the road, and in an instant the men had left the emptied cart, and were marching on into the sunny distance.
As the afternoon lengthened the heat grew more oppressive. Straight ahead there was dust and sunshine and the ceaseless tramp, and on either side the fresh fields were scorched and whitened by a powdering of hot sand. Beyond the rise and dip of the hills, the mountains burned like blue flames on the horizon, and overhead the sky was hard as an inverted brazier.
Dan had begun to limp, for his stiff boots galled his feet. His senses were blunted by the hot sand which filled his eyes and ears and nostrils, and there was a shimmer over all the broad landscape. When he shook his hair from his forehead, the dust floated slowly down and settled in a scorching ring about his neck.
The day closed gradually, and as they neared the river, the mountains emerged from obscure outlines into wooded heights upon which the trees showed soft and gray in the sunset. A cool breath was blown through a strip of damp woodland, where the pale bodies of the sycamores were festooned in luxuriant vines, and from the twilight long shadows stretched across the red clay road. Then, as they went down a rocky slope, a fringe of willows appeared suddenly from the blur of green, and they saw the Shenandoah running between falling banks, with the colours of the sunset floating like pink flowers upon its breast.
With a shout the front line plunged into the stream, holding its heavy muskets high above the current of the water, and filing upon the opposite bank, into a rough road which wound amid the ferns.