"Pardon me for saying it to you, an officer, Mr. Mason, but it's our
business not to get killed when it's not needed, so we can save ourselves
to be killed when it is needed."

"I suppose you're right, Sergeant. At any rate I'm glad enough to keep
under cover, but do you see anything in those woods over there? We're on
the extreme left flank here, and maybe they're trying to overlap us."

"I think I do. Men with rifles are in there. I'll speak to the colonel."

He crawled to Colonel Winchester, who was crouched a dozen feet away,
and pointed to the wood, or rather thicket of scrub. But Dick meanwhile
saw increasing numbers of men there. They were beyond the line of battle
and were not obscured by the clouds of smoke. As he stared he saw a
weazened figure under an enormous, broad-brimmed hat, and, although he
could not discern the face at the distance, he knew that it was Slade,
come with a new and perhaps larger body of riflemen to burn away the
extreme left flank of the Union force.

As the colonel and the sergeant crawled back Dick told them what he had
seen, and they recognized at once the imminence of the danger. Colonel
Winchester looked at the great columns of fire and smoke in front of him.
He did not know when the main attack would sweep down upon them again,
but he took his resolution at once.

He ordered his men to wheel about, and, using Slade's own tactics,
to creep forward with their rifles. Most of his men were sharpshooters
and he felt that they would be a match for those whom the guerrilla led.
Sergeant Whitley kept by his side, and out of a vast experience in border