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This field we overlooked through a fence-row of persimmon and wild plum. Among these bushes, half fallen into a rain-gully, a catalpa, of belated bloom, was loaded with blossoms and bees, and I was directing Camille's glance to it when the shots came. Another outcry or two followed, and then a weird silence. "Some of our boys attacked by a rabbit," I suggested, but still hearkened.
"That was not play, Mr. Smith," Miss Harper had begun to respond, when a voice across the sedge-field called with startling clearness, "Hi! there goes one of them! Halt! Halt, you blue " pop! pop! pop! "Prisoners making a break!" I forgot all my tatters and stood on tiptoe in the stirrups to overpeer the fence-row. The next instant "Sh sh!" said I and slid to the ground. "Hold this bridle!"
A star blossomed out in the tranquil depths above me, white and pure as a thought of God; some dun-colored boats were drifting in an azure sea out in the west, and a whippoorwill's plaintive wail sounded through the dusk from adown the fence-row.
They passed behind some fence-row foliage, reappeared nearer, and suddenly bobbed smartly up to the roadside fence the dusty hats of two Federal horsemen. The wearers sat looking over into the field between them and us. I asked Ferry if he wasn't afraid they would see us. "That is what we want," was his reply; "only, they must not know we want it. Keep very still; don't move."
A hint of new green brightened every road-side, willows were full of yellow light, and a pink and purple flush answered from woods to fence-row, from fence-row to woods, across and across the three counties. "This pike's hardly a pike at all since the railroad's started," said the Major, more to himself than to Barbara and Johanna; for these were the two rear occupants of the carriage.
In the bushes by the fence-row were a pair of cardinal grosbeaks, the male whistling divinely, quite unabashed by the volubility of a mocking-bird who balanced himself on the treetop overhead, "Superb and sole, upon a pluméd spray," and seemed determined to show a Yankee stranger what mocking-birds could really do when they set out.
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