"I fancy that after sunrise we won't have time to think about water,"
he said.

But Dick was not destined to sleep. He lay down for a while, and he saw
hundreds of others around him lying motionless as if dead. Warner and
Pennington were among them, but he could not close his own eyes. His
brain was still hot and excited, and to calm himself if possible he
walked along the slope until he saw a faint light in the valley behind
it. A tall figure, which he recognized as that of Colonel Winchester,
was going toward the light.

Dick, being on such good terms with his colonel, would have followed him,
but when he came to the edge of the glade he drew back. General Thomas
was sitting on the huge, upthrust root of an oak, and he was writing
dispatches by the light of a flickering candle held by an aide. Officers
of high rank, one of whom Dick recognized as the young general, Garfield,
stood around him. Colonel Winchester joined the group, and stood waiting
in silence to receive orders, too, Dick supposed.

The lad withdrew hastily, but driven by an overmastering curiosity,
and knowing that he was doing no harm, he turned back and watched for a
little space beside a bush.

The flame of the candle wavered under the wind, and sometimes the light
shone full upon the face of Thomas. It was the same face that Dick had
first beheld when he carried the dispatches to him in Kentucky. He was
calm, inscrutable at this, the most desperate crisis the Union cause ever
knew in the west. Dick could not see that his hand trembled a particle
as he wrote, although lieutenant and general alike knew that they