John Buford kept urging Reynolds to be more careful. The major-general was guiding his horse among the torn mounds of shrubbery, springing it lightly over dismantled fences, pausing with his upraised field-glass at the most exposed fence corners. For God’s sake, Buford exclaimed in his tuneless Kentucky drawl, take a little care, sir. For a long time the superior officer did not pay any attention to this entreaty, and when he did observe it he only laughed. He had a close-clipped, scrubby beard, and a way of appearing neat and on parade even when the hollows of his cheeks were larded with grime and his horse’s legs all plastered with mud and manure. When troops waited on a march, and fell out in somebody’s pasture to lie beside their stacked arms, Reynolds made it a habit to notify brigade commanders if their men had time enough to boil coffee.

Lieutenant Steele would cheerfully have washed Reynolds’ boots with his tongue, and accounted it a privilege.

Then a soldier from Major Van de Graaf’s Fifth Alabama battalion—a young man about twenty-one, named Rufus Canty—poked his rifle through a bank of thistles. It was a five-round Spencer, captured from a Yankee only two months before, and Rufus Canty was very proud of his gun. Forever he was trying to see what it would do.

He lay a few feet in advance of his line, where Archer halted in Grandpa Germels’ east pasture, and all along the weeds his companions were firing. The reports rang solidly, in varying volume: there were Springfields and Vincennes muskets, and Colts, and Spencers, and even a few Henrys, all clanging away at the blue lumps who waited beyond the creek. This little nest of weeds had a cool, minty odor; it spoke of frogs and creeping green grasshoppers … Rufus Canty thought of a church-meeting in the woods back home. He had wandered away with Araminta Bates, and they lay among some such weeds as these, making love until the stars came out. Araminta was afraid of snakes which might be crawling around, but he only laughed at her. Sho, he said, I’m not going to stop loving you because of some old snake. Later, Araminta had been right scared; she thought she was in the family way, but it happened that she wasn’t. He wondered what old man Bates would have done about it … The weeds smelled like church-meeting. A couple of wings of cold fried chicken: now, that wouldn’t be bad. Dinners in baskets, roasting ears in the fire, and a big hunk of vinegar pie. The preacher chuckling to Rufe Canty’s mother, “And, Sister, I never knowed a chicken had any parts besides a neck, till I was growed” … he nudged the barrel of his Spencer, fondly. It was a good gun.