BOB HAD LOST THE FACULTY of hearing sounds of a high sharp timbre, but had grown very keen to thuds, bumps, and rumbles, which he heard not with his ears but with his feet and his ribs. What he listened for, with said organs, was hoofbeats, door-slams, gunfire, &c. Of guns he had heard only a little thus far. Hooves were spattering the earth to their rear: the Whig Association cavalry, dashing across the back of the line. Bob was leading his company across a pasture toward a hedgerow that bordered its up-hill side. Like all the other hedgerows on this estate, it had been trimmed short, which Bob looked on as a military preparation; the height was good for men to kneel behind and shoot over.