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"Is he plucky?" Hallam said; "We were on picket duty for three days last week. The Colonel had become sick of their popping at us, and asked for twelve carbines to the troop.
The exaggerated parallax at the horizon made the rising star seem to move rapidly for the first few minutes, and men, ignorant of this, naturally mistook its character. In a similar way an occasional shot on the picket line would be the cause of a subdued excitement.
But although not a single picket stood between his outposts and Staunton, Banks dared not move. By moving to Elk Run Valley Jackson had barred the way of the Federals more effectively than if he had intrenched his troops across the Staunton road. South of Harrisonburg, where the Valley widens to five-and-twenty miles, there was no strong position.
In few and profane words, I explained the situation to my employer, and asked for a horse that would put the Rio Grande behind me before morning. A number were on picket near by, and several of the boys ran for the best mounts available. A purse was forced into my pocket, well filled with gold.
Here he dismounted, and stopped beside the farthest of the four unlimbered cannon. Before the guns an artillery sentry was pacing up and down; he stood at attention when the officer arrived, but at a sign resumed his measured, monotonous pacing. Behind the guns were their limbers and still farther back picket ropes and artillerymen's bonfires.
The picket line, approaching its sixth month of duty, had aroused the country to an unprecedented interest in suf- frage; it had rallied widespread public support to the amend- ment as a war measure, and had itself become almost univer- sally accepted if not universally approved.
He gave little encouragement, therefore, to what I proposed, yet the conversation was immediately beneficial in one way, for when I laid before him the true condition of the cavalry, he promptly relieved it from much of the arduous and harassing picket service it was performing, thus giving me about two weeks in which to nurse the horses before the campaign opened.
"In the school," Rose-Ellen told her. "But outside school they act like even Nico had smallpox. They make me sick!" Rose-Ellen spoke both indignantly and sorrowfully. That very day the three girls had come out of the church together, and had paused to look over the neat picket fence of the yard next the church. It seemed a sweet little yard, smelling of newly cut grass and flowers.
At length he paused in front of a wooden house of a dirty grayish brown, too high for its length and breadth, with tall shutters of the same color, and a picket fence on top of the retaining wall which lifted the yard above the plank walk. It was an ugly house, surely. But an ugly house may look beautiful when surrounded by such heavy trees as this was.
He got cl'ar away from me that is, the mustang. The yeller-belly didn't." "What! you haven't ?" "But I hev, Cap'n. I had good, soun' reason." "What reason?" I demanded. "In the first place, the feller wur a gurillye; and in the next, he wur an outpost picket." "How know you this?" "Wal, Cap'n, I struck his trail on the edge of the thicket.
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