selected for the work. The force sent out was but small; for the long line
was worn to a thin one in those days, and great changes were taking place,
the consequences of which were known only to the commanders. In a few days
the commander of the expedition found that he must divide his small force
for a time, at least, to accomplish his purpose, and sending the old Colonel
with one battery of artillery to guard one pass, must push on
over the mountain by another way to meet the expected force, if possible,
and repel it before it crossed the farther range. Thus the old battery,
on an April evening of 1865, found itself toiling alone up the steep
mountain road which leads above the river to the gap, which formed
the chief pass in that part of the Blue Ridge. Both men and horses looked,
in the dim and waning light of the gray April day, rather like shadows
of the beings they represented than the actual beings themselves.
And anyone seeing them as they toiled painfully up, the thin horses
floundering in the mud, and the men, often up to their knees,
tugging at the sinking wheels, now stopping to rest, and always moving
so slowly that they seemed scarcely to advance at all, might have thought them
the ghosts of some old battery lost from some long gone and forgotten war
on that deep and desolate mountain road. Often, when they stopped,
the blowing of the horses and the murmuring of the river in its bed below
were the only sounds heard, and the tired voices of the men when they spoke
among themselves seemed hardly more articulate sounds than they.
Then the voice of the mounted figure on the roan horse half hidden in the mist
would cut in, clear and inspiring, in a tone of encouragement more than
of command, and everything would wake up: the drivers would shout
and crack their whips; the horses would bend themselves on the collars and
flounder in the mud; the men would spring once more to the mud-clogged wheels,
and the slow ascent would begin again.

The orders to the Colonel, as has been said, were brief: To hold the pass