But all the young Southerners were in good spirits now.

They had learned of the alarm caused in the North by Kernstown, and that a third of McClellan's army had been detached to guard against them.

Nor had Banks and Shields yet dared to attack them.
"There's what troubles Banks," said Sherburne, pointing with his saber to a towering mass of mountains which rose somber and dark in the very center of the Shenandoah Valley.

"He doesn't know which side of the Massanuttons to take." Harry looked up at these peaks and ridges, famous now in the minds of all Virginians, towering a half mile in the air, clothed from base to summit with dense forest of oak and pine, although today the crests were wrapped in snowy mists.

They cut the Shenandoah valley into two smaller valleys, the wider and more nearly level one on the west.