"Hi, there, sergeant! Here are your friends! Come up and make the same empty report that we've got ready for the colonel." Sergeant Daniel Whitley looked at the three lads, and his face brightened.

He had a good intellect under his thatch of hair, and a warm heart within his strong body.

The boys, although lieutenants, and he only a sergeant in the ranks, treated him usually as an equal and often as a superior.
Colonel Winchester's regiment and the remains of Colonel Newcomb's Pennsylvanians had been sent east after the defeat of the Union army at the Seven Days, and were now with Pope's Army of Virginia, which was to hold the valley and also protect Washington.

Grant's success at Shiloh had been offset by McClellan's failure before Richmond, and the President and his Cabinet at Washington were filled with justifiable alarm.

Pope was a western man, a Kentuckian, and he had insisted upon having some of the western troops with him.
The sergeant rode his horse slowly up the slope, and joined the lads over whom he watched like a father.
"And what have the hundred eyes of Argus beheld ?" asked Warner.
"Argus ?" said the sergeant.