"
"The 'on to Richmond' business?"
"Yes."
"I wonder what they'll do about it over yonder," said Curtis, pointing
over his right shoulder. By "over yonder" he meant the North in general
and Massachusetts especially. Curtis was a Boston boy, and his sense of
locality was so strong that, during all his wanderings in Virginia, I do
not believe there was a moment, day or night, when he could not have
made a bee-line for Faneuil Hall.
"Do about it?" cried Strong. "They'll make about two hundred thousand
blue flannel trousers and send them along, each pair with a man in
it,--all the short men in the long trousers, and all the tall men in the
short ones," he added, ruefully contemplating his own leg-gear, which
scarcely reached to his ankles.
"That's so," said Blakely. "Just now, when I was tackling the commissary
for an extra candle, I saw a crowd of new fellows drawing blankets."
"I say there, drop that!" cried Strong. "All right, sir, didn't know it
was you," he added hastily, seeing it was Lieutenant Haines who had
thrown back the flap of the tent, and let in a gust of wind and rain
that threatened the most serious bronchial consequences to our
discontented tallow dip.
"You're to bunk in here," said the lieutenant, speaking to some one
outside. The some one stepped in, and Haines vanished in the darkness.
When Strong had succeeded in restoring the candle to consciousness, the
light fell upon a tall, shy-looking man of about thirty-five, with long,
hay-colored beard and mustache, upon which the rain-drops stood in
clusters, like the night-dew on patches of cobweb in a meadow.
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