sharply to the west, running along the summit for perhaps one hundred
yards. There it turned southward again and went zigzagging downward
through the forest. At the salient of that second angle was a large flat
rock, jutting out northward, overlooking the deep valley from which the
road ascended. The rock capped a high cliff; a stone dropped from its
outer edge would have fallen sheer downward one thousand feet to the
tops of the pines. The angle where the soldier lay was on another spur
of the same cliff. Had he been awake he would have commanded a view, not
only of the short arm of the road and the jutting rock, but of the
entire profile of the cliff below it. It might well have made him giddy
to look.

The country was wooded everywhere except at the bottom of the valley to
the northward, where there was a small natural meadow, through which
flowed a stream scarcely visible from the valley's rim. This open ground
looked hardly larger than an ordinary door-yard, but was really several
acres in extent. Its green was more vivid than that of the inclosing
forest. Away beyond it rose a line of giant cliffs similar to those upon
which we are supposed to stand in our survey of the savage scene, and
through which the road had somehow made its climb to the summit. The
configuration of the valley, indeed, was such that from this point of
observation it seemed entirely shut in, and one could but have wondered
how the road which found a way out of it had found a way into it, and
whence came and whither went the waters of the stream that parted the
meadow more than a thousand feet below.

No country is so wild and difficult but men will make it a theatre of
war; concealed in the forest at the bottom of that military rat-trap, in
which half a hundred men in possession of the exits might have starved
an army to submission, lay five regiments of Federal infantry. They had