ONE night in the autumn of 1861 a man sat alone in the heart of a forest in western Virginia. The region was one of the wildest on the continent--the Cheat Mountain country. There was no lack of people close at hand, however; within a mile of where the man sat was the now silent camp of a whole Federal brigade. Somewhere about--it might be still nearer--was a force of the enemy, the num-bers unknown. It was this uncertainty as to its numbers and position that accounted for the man's presence in that lonely spot; he was a young officer of a Federal infantry regiment and his business there was to guard his sleeping comrades in the camp against a surprise. He was in command of a detachment of men constituting a picket-guard.
These men he had stationed just at nightfall in an irregular line, determined by the nature of the ground, several hundred yards in front of where he now sat. The line ran through the forest, among the rocks and laurel thickets, the men fifteen or twenty paces apart, all in concealment and under injunction of strict silence and unremitting vigilance.
In four hours, if nothing occurred, they would be relieved by a fresh detachment from the reserve now resting in care of its captain some distance away to the left and rear. Before stationing his men the young officer of whom we are writing had pointed out to his two sergeants the spot at which he would be found if it should be necessary to consult him, or if his presence at the front line should be required.
It was a quiet enough spot--the fork of an old wood-road, on the two branches of which, prolong-ing themselves deviously forward in the dim moon-light, the sergeants were themselves stationed, a few paces in rear of the line. If driven sharply back by a sudden onset of the enemy--the pickets are not expected to make a stand after firing--the men would come into the converging roads and naturally following them to their point of intersection could be rallied and 'formed.' In his small way the author of these dispositions was something of a strategist;if Napoleon had planned as intelligently at Water-loo he would have won that memorable battle and been overthrown later.
Second-Lieutenant Brainerd Byring was a brave and efficient officer, young and comparatively inex-perienced as he was in the business of killing his fellow-men. He had enlisted in the very first days of the war as a private, with no military knowledge whatever, had been made first-sergeant of his com-pany on account of his education and engaging manner, and had been lucky enough to lose his cap-tain by a Confederate bullet; in the resulting promo-tions he had gained a commission. He had been in several engagements, such as they were--at Phi-lippi, Rich Mountain, Carrick's Ford and Green-brier--and had borne himself with such gallantry as not to attract the attention of his superior of-ficers. The exhilaration of battle was agreeable to him, but the sight of the dead, with their clay faces, blank eyes and stiff bodies, which when not unnat-urally shrunken were unnaturally swollen, had always intolerably affected him. He felt toward them a kind of reasonless antipathy that was something more than the physical and spiritual repugnance common to us all. Doubtless this feeling was due to his unusually acute sensibilities--his keen sense of the beautiful, which these hideous things outraged.
Whatever may have been the cause, he could not look upon a dead body without a loathing which had in it an element of resentment. What others have re-spected as the dignity of death had to him no exist-ence--was altogether unthinkable. Death was a thing to be hated. It was not picturesque, it had no tender and solemn side--a dismal thing, hideous in all its manifestations and suggestions. Lieutenant Byring was a braver man than anybody knew, for nobody knew his horror of that which he was ever ready to incur.
Having posted his men, instructed his sergeants and retired to his station, he seated himself on a log, and with senses all alert began his vigil. For greater ease he loosened his sword-belt and taking his heavy revolver from his holster laid it on the log beside him. He felt very comfortable, though he hardly gave the fact a thought, so intently did he listen for any sound from the front which might have a menac-ing significance--a shout, a shot, or the footfall of one of his sergeants coming to apprise him of some-thing worth knowing. From the vast, invisible ocean of moonlight overhead fell, here and there, a slender, broken stream that seemed to plash against the in-tercepting branches and trickle to earth, forming small white pools among the clumps of laurel. But these leaks were few and served only to accentuate the blackness of his environment, which his imagina-tion found it easy to people with all manner of un-familiar shapes, menacing, uncanny, or merely grotesque.
