XXXV. WHITE OAK SWAMP…

XXXV. WHITE OAK SWAMP

The Grapevine Bridge being at last rebuilt, Stonewall Jackson's fourteen brigades crossed the Chickahominy, the movement occupying a great part of the night. Dawn of the thirtieth found the advance at Savage Station.

The storm in the night had swelled the myriad creeks, and extended all morasses. The roads were mud, the wild tangles of underwood held water like a sponge. But the dawn was glorious, with carmine and purple towers and the coolest fresh-washed purity of air and light. Major-General Richard Ewell, riding at the head of his division, opined that it was as clear as the plains. A reconnoitring party brought him news about something or other to the eastward. He jerked his head, swore reflectively, and asked where was "Old Jackson."

"He rode ahead, sir, to speak to General Magruder."

"Well, you go, Nelson, and tell him--No, you go, Major Stafford."

Stafford went, riding through the cool, high glory of the morning. He found Jackson and Magruder at the edge of the peach orchard. All around were Magruder's troops, and every man's head was turned toward the stark and dust-hued figure on the dust-hued nag. The first had come from the Valley with a towering reputation, nor indeed did the last lack bards to sing of him. Whatever tarn cap the one had worn during the past three days, however bewildering had been his inaction, his reputation held. This was Jackson.... There must have been some good reason ... this was Stonewall Jackson. Magruder's brigades cheered him vehemently, and he looked at them unsmiling, with a mere motion of his hand toward the rusty old cadet cap. Magruder, magnificently soldierly, with much of manner and rich colour, magnanimously forgetful this morning of "other important duties" and affably debonair though his eyelids dropped for want of sleep, came gradually to halt in his fluent speech.--"Weally, you can't talk forever to a potht! If thilenthe be golden he ith the heavietht weight of hith time."--Jackson gathered up his reins, nodded and rode off, the troops cheering as he went by.

Stafford, coming up with him, saluted and gave his message. Jackson received it with impassivity and rode on. Conceiving it to be his duty to attend an answer, the staff officer accompanied him, though a little in the rear. Here were an aide and a courier, and the three rode silently behind their silent chief. At the Williamsburg road there came a halt. Jackson checked Little Sorrel, and sat looking toward Richmond. Down the road, in the sunrise light, came at a canter a knot of horsemen handsomely mounted and equipped, the one in front tall and riding an iron-grey. Stafford recognized the commander-in-chief. Jackson sat very still, beneath a honey locust. The night before, in a wood hard by, the 17th Mississippi had run into a Federal brigade. The latter had fired, at point blank, a withering volley. Many a tall Mississippian had fallen. Now in the early light their fellow soldiers had gone seeking them in the wood, drawn them forth, and laid them in a row in the wet sedge beside the road. Nearly every man had been shot through the brain. They lay ghastly, open-eyed, wet with rain, staring at the cool and pure concave of the sky. Two or three soldiers were moving slowly up and down the line, bent on identifications. Presumably Jackson was aware of that company of the dead, but their presence could not be said to disturb him. He sat with his large hands folded over the saddle-bow, with the forage cap cutting all but one blue-grey gleam of his eyes, still as stone wall or mountain or the dead across the way. As the horsemen came nearer his lips parted. "That is General Lee?"

"Yes, general."

"Good!"

Lee's staff halted; Lee himself came on, checked the iron-grey, dismounted, and walked toward the honey locust. Jackson swung himself stiffly out of the saddle and stepped forward. The two met. Lee stretched out his hand, said something in his gracious voice. The piteous row of dead men, with their open eyes, caught his glance. He drew his brows together, pressed his lips hard, parted them in a sigh and went on with his speech. The two men, so different in aspect, talked not long together. The staff could not hear what was said, but Lee spoke the most and very earnestly. Jackson nodded, said, "Good!" several times, and once, "It is in God's hands, General Lee!"

The courier holding Traveller brought him up. Lee mounted, tarried, a great and gallant figure, a moment longer, then rode toward Magruder at the peach orchard. His staff followed, saluting Stonewall Jackson as they passed. He, too, remounted in his stiff and awkward fashion, and turned Little Sorrel's head down the Williamsburg road. Behind him now, in the clear bright morning, could be heard the tramp of his brigades. Stafford pushed his horse level with the sorrel. "Your pardon, general, but may I ask if there's any order for General Ewell--"

"There is none, sir."

"Then shall I return?"

"No, you will wait, sir. From the cross-roads I may send directions."

They rode on by wood and field. Overhead was a clear, high, azure sky; no clouds, but many black sailing specks. Around, on the sandy road, and in the shaggy, bordering growth, were witnesses enough to the Federal retreat--a confused medley of abandoned objects. Broken and half-burned wagons appeared, like wreckage from a storm. There did not lack dead or dying horses, nor, here and there, dead or wounded men. In the thicker woods or wandering through the ruined fields appeared, forlornly, stragglers from the Federal column. D. H. Hill, leading the grey advance, swept up hundreds of these. From every direction spirals of smoke rose into the crystal air,--barns and farmhouses, mills, fences, hayricks, and monster heaps of Federal stores set on fire in that memorable "change of base." For all the sunshine of the June morning, the rain-washed air, the singing birds in the jewelled green of the forest, there was something in the time and place inexpressibly sinister and sad.

Or so thought Maury Stafford, riding silently with the aide and the courier. At Gaines's Mill he had won emphatic praise for a cool and daring ride across the battlefield, and for the quick rallying and leading into action of a command whose officers were all down. With Ewell at Dispatch Station, he had volunteered for duty at the crossing of the Chickahominy, and in a hand-to-hand fight with a retiring Federal regiment he and his detachment had acquitted themselves supremely well. As far as this warfare went, he had reason to be satisfied. But he was not so, and as he rode he thought the morning scene of a twilight dreariness. He had no enthusiasm for war. In every aspect of life, save one, that he dealt with, he carried a cool and level head, and he thought war barbarous and its waste a great tragedy. Martial music and earth-shaking charges moved him for a moment, as they moved others for an hour or a day. The old, instinctive response passed with swiftness, and he settled to the base of a steadfast conclusion that humanity turned aside to the jungle many times too often in a century. That, individually, he had turned into a certain other allied jungle, he was conscious--not sardonically conscious, for here all his judgment was warped, but conscious. His mind ranged in this jungle with an unhappy fury hardly modern.

As he rode he looked toward Richmond. He knew, though he scarcely knew how he knew, that Judith Cary was there. He had himself meant to ride to Richmond that idle twenty-eighth. Then had come the necessity of accompanying Ewell to Dispatch Station, and his chance was gone. The Stonewall Brigade had been idle enough.... Perhaps, the colonel of the 65th had gone.... It was a thick and bitter jungle, and he gathered every thorn within it to himself and smelled of every poisonous flower.

The small, silent cavalcade came to a cross-roads. Jackson stopped, sitting Little Sorrel beneath a tall, gaunt, lightning-blackened pine. The three with him waited a few feet off. Behind them they heard the on-coming column; D. H. Hill leading, then Jackson's own division. The sun was above the treetops, the sky cloudless, all the forest glistening. The minutes passed. Jackson sat like a stone. At last, from the heavy wood pierced by the cross-road, came a rapid clatter of hoofs. Munford appeared, behind him fifty of his cavalry. The fifty checked their horses; the leader came on and saluted. Jackson spoke in the peculiar voice he used when displeased. "Colonel Munford, I ordered you to be here at sunrise."

Munford explained. "The men were much scattered, sir. They don't know the country, and in the storm last night and the thick wood they couldn't see their horses' ears. They had nothing to eat and--"

He came to a pause. No amount of good reasons ever for long rolled fluently off the tongue before Jackson. He spoke now, still in the concentrated monotony of his voice of displeasure. "Yes, sir. But, colonel, I ordered you to be here at sunrise. Move on with your men. If you meet the enemy drive in his pickets, and if you want artillery Colonel Crutchfield will furnish you."

Munford moved on, his body of horse increasing in size as the lost troopers emerged in twos and threes or singly from the forest and turned down the road to join the command. The proceeding gave an effect of disordered ranks. Jackson beckoned the courier. "Go tell Colonel Munford that his men are straggling badly."

The courier went, and presently returned. Munford was with him. "General, I thought I had best come myself and explain--they aren't straggling. We were all separated in the dark night and--"

"Yes, sir. But I ordered you to be here at sunrise. Move on now, and drive in the enemy's pickets, and if you want artillery Colonel Crutchfield will furnish you."

Munford and the 2d Virginia went on, disappearing around a bend in the road. The sound of the artillery coming up was now loud in the clear air. Jackson listened a moment, then left the shadow of the pine, and with the two attending officers and the courier resumed the way to White Oak Swamp.

Brigade by brigade, twenty-five thousand men in grey passed Savage Station and followed Stonewall Jackson. The air was fresh, the troops in spirits. Nobody was going to let McClellan get to the James, after all! The brigades broke into song. They laughed, they joked, they cheered every popular field officer as he passed, they genially discussed the heretofore difficulties of the campaign and the roseate promise of the day. They knew it was the crucial day; that McClellan must be stopped before sunset or he would reach the shelter of his gunboats. They were in a Fourth of July humour; they meant to make the day remembered. Life seemed bright again and much worth while. They even grudgingly agreed that there was a curious kind of attractiveness about all this flat country, and the still waters, and the very tall trees, and labyrinthine vivid green undergrowth. Intermittent fevers had begun to appear, but, one and all, the invalids declared that this was their good day. "Shucks! What's a little ague? Anyhow, it'll go away when we get back to the Valley. Going back to the Valley? Well, we should think so! This country's got an eerie kind of good looks, and it raises sweet potatoes all right, but for steady company give us mountains! We'll drop McClellan in one of these swamps, and we'll have a review at the fair grounds at Richmond so's all the ladies can see us, and then we'll go back to the Valley pike and Massanutton and Mr. Commissary Banks! They must be missing us awful. Somebody sing something,--

"Old Grimes is dead, that good old man, Whom we shall see no more! He wore a grey Confederate coat All buttoned down before--"

"Don't like it that way? All right--"

"He wore a blue damn-Yankee coat All buttoned down before--"

The Stonewall Brigade passed a new-made grave in a small graveyard, from which the fence had been burned. A little further on they came to a burned smithy; the blacksmith's house beside it also a ruin, black and charred. On a stone, between two lilac-bushes, sat a very old man. Beside him stood a girl, a handsome creature, dark and bright-cheeked. "Send them to hell, boys, send them to hell!" quavered the old man. The girl raised a sweet and vibrant voice: "Send them to hell, men, send them to hell!"

"We'll do our best, ma'am, we'll do our best!" answered the Stonewall.

The sun mounted high. They were moving now through thick woods, broken by deep creeks and bits of swamp. All about were evidences enough that an army had travelled before them, and that that army was exceedingly careless of its belongings. All manner of impediments lay squandered; waste and ruin were everywhere. Sometimes the men caught an odour of burning meat, of rice and breadstuffs. In a marshy meadow a number of wrecked, canvas-topped wagons showed like a patch of mushrooms, giant and dingy. In a forest glade rested like a Siegfried smithy an abandoned travelling forge. Camp-kettles hacked in two were met with, and boxes of sutlers' wares smashed to fragments. The dead horses were many, and there was disgust with the buzzards, they rose or settled in such clouds. The troops, stooping to drink from the creeks, complained that the water was foul.

Very deep woods appeared on the horizon. "Guide says that's White Oak Swamp!--Guide says that's White Oak Swamp!" Firing broke out ahead. "Cavalry rumpus!--Hello! Artillery butting in, too!--everybody but us! Well, boys, I always did think infantry a mighty no-'count, undependable arm--infantry of the Army of the Valley, anyway! God knows the moss has been growing on us for a week!"

Munford sent back a courier to Jackson, riding well before the head of the column. "Bridge is burned, sir. They're in strong force on the other side--"

"Good!" said Jackson. "Tell Colonel Crutchfield to bring up the guns."

He rode on, the aide, the courier, and Maury Stafford yet with him. They passed a deserted Federal camp and hospital, and came between tall trees and through dense swamp undergrowth to a small stream with many arms. It lay still beneath the blue sky, overhung by many a graceful, vine-draped tree. The swamp growth stretched for some distance on either side, and through openings in the foliage the blue glint of the arms could be seen. To the right there was some cleared ground. In front the road stopped short. The one bridge had been burned by the retreating Federal rearguard. Two blue divisions, three batteries--in all over twenty thousand men--now waited on the southern bank to dispute the White Oak Crossing.

Stafford again pushed his horse beside Jackson's. "Well, sir?"

"I hunted once through this swamp, general. There is an old crossing near the bridge--"

"Passable for cavalry, sir?"

"Passable by cavalry and infantry, sir. Even the guns might somehow be gotten across."

"I asked, sir, if it was passable for cavalry."

"It is, sir."

Jackson turned to his aide. "Go tell Colonel Crutchfield I want to see him."

Crutchfield appeared. "Where are your guns, colonel?"

"General, their batteries on the ridge over there command the road, and the thick woods below their guns are filled with sharpshooters. I want to get the guns behind the crest of the hill on this side, and I am opening a road through the wood over there. They'll be up directly--seven batteries, Carter's, Hardaway's, Nelson's, Rhett's, Reilly's, and Balthis'. We'll open then at a thousand yards, and we'll take them, I think, by surprise."

"Very good, colonel. That is all."

The infantry began to arrive. Brigade by brigade, as it came up, turned to right or to left, standing under arms in the wood above the White Oak Swamp. As the Stonewall Brigade came, under tall trees and over earth that gave beneath the feet, flush with the stream itself, the grey guns, now in place upon the low ridge to the right, opened, thirty-one of them, with simultaneous thunder. Crutchfield's manoeuvre had not been observed. The thirty-one guns blazed without warning, and the blue artillery fell into confusion. The Parrotts blazed in turn, four times, then they limbered up in haste and left the ridge. Crutchfield sent Wooding's battery tearing down the slope to the road immediately in front of the burned bridge. Wooding opened fire and drove out the infantry support from the opposite forest. Jackson, riding toward the stream, encountered Munford. "Colonel, move your men over the creek and take those guns."

Munford looked. "I don't know that we can cross it, sir."

"Yes, you can cross it, colonel. Try."

Munford and a part of the 2d Virginia dashed in. The stream was in truth narrow enough, and though it was deep here, with a shifting bottom, and though the debris from the ruined bridge made it full of snares, the horsemen got across and pushed up the shore toward the guns. A thick and leafy wood to the right leaped fire--another and unsuspected body of blue infantry. The echoes were yet ringing when, from above, an unseen battery opened on the luckless cavalry. The blue rifles cracked again, the horses began to rear and plunge, several men were hit. There was nothing to do but to get somehow back to the north bank. Munford and his men pushed out of the rain of iron, through the wood for some distance down the stream, and there recrossed, not without difficulty.

The thirty-one guns shelled the wood which had last spoken, and drove out the skirmishers with whom it was filled. These took refuge in another deep and leafy belt still commanding the stream and the ruined causeway. A party of grey pioneers fell to work to rebuild the bridge. From the crest on the southern side behind the deep foliage two Federal batteries, before unnoted, opened on the grey cannoneers. Wooding, on the road before the bridge, had to fall back. Under cover of the guns the blue infantry swarmed again into the wood. Shell and bullet hissed and pattered into the water by the abutments of the ruined bridge. The working party drew back. "Damnation! They mustn't fling them minies round loose like that!"

Wright's brigade of Huger's division came up. Wright made his report. "We tried Brackett's ford a mile up stream, sir. Couldn't manage it. Got two companies over by the skin of our teeth. They drove in some pickets on the other side. Road through the swamp over there covered by felled trees. Beyond is a small meadow and beyond that rising ground, almost free of trees. There are Yankee batteries on the crest, and a large force of infantry lying along the side of the ridge. They command the meadow and the swamp."

So tall were the trees, so thick the undergrowth, so full the midsummer foliage that the guns, thundering at each other across the narrow stream, never saw their antagonists. Sharpshooters and skirmishers were as hidden. Except as regarded the pioneers striving with the bridge, neither side could see the damage that was done. The noise was tremendous, echoing loudly from the opposing low ridges and rolling through the swamp. The hollow filled with smoke; above the treetops a dull saffron veil was drawn across the sky. The firing was without intermission, a monotonous thunder, beneath which the working party strove spasmodically at the bridge, the cavalry chafed to and fro, and the infantry, filling all the woods and the little clearings to the rear, began to swear. "Is it the Red Sea down there? Why can't we cross without a bridge? Nobody's going to get drowned! Ain't more'n a hundred men been drowned since this war began! O Great Day in the Morning! I'm tired of doing nothing!"

General Wade Hampton of D. H. Hill's division, leaving his brigade in a pine wood, went with his son and with an aide, Rawlins Lowndes, on a reconnoitring expedition of his own. He was a woodsman and hunter, with experience of swamps and bayous. Returning, he sought out Jackson, and found him sitting on a fallen pine by the roadside near the slowly, slowly mending bridge. Hampton dismounted and made his report. "We got over, three of us, general, a short way above. It wasn't difficult. The stream's clear of obstructions there and has a sandy bottom. We could see through the trees on the other side. There's a bit of level, and a hillside covered with troops--a strong position. But we got across the stream, sir."

"Yes. Can you make a bridge there?"

"I can make one for infantry, sir. Not, I think, for the artillery. Cutting a road would expose our position."

"Very good. Make the bridge, general."

Hampton's men cut saplings and threw a rude foot-bridge across the stream where he had traversed it. He returned and reported. "They are quiet and unsuspecting beyond, sir. The crossing would be slow, and there may be an accident, but cross we certainly can."

Jackson, still seated on the fallen pine, sat as though he had been there through eternity, and would remain through eternity. The gun thundered, the minies sang. One of the latter struck a tree above his head and severed a leafy twig. It came floating down, touched his shoulder like an accolade and rested on the pine needles by his foot. He gave it no attention, sitting like a graven image with clasped hands, listening to the South Carolinian's report. Hampton ceased to speak and waited. It was the height of the afternoon. He stood three minutes in silence, perhaps, then glanced toward the man on the log. Jackson's eyes were closed, his head slightly lifted. "Praying?" thought the South Carolinian. "Well, there's a time for everything--" Jackson opened his eyes, drew the forage cap far down over them, and rose from the pine. The other looked for him to speak, but he said nothing. He walked a little way down the road and stood among the whistling minies, looking at the slowly, slowly building bridge.

Hampton did as Wright and Munford had done before him--went back to his men. D. H. Hill, after an interview of his own, had retired to the artillery. "Yes, yes, Rhett, go ahead! Do something--make a noise--do something! Infantry's kept home from school to-day--measles, I reckon, or maybe it's lockjaw!"

About three o'clock there was caught from the southward, between the loud wrangling of the batteries above White Oak, another sound,--first two or three detonations occurring singly, then a prolonged and continuous roar. The batteries above White Oak Swamp, the sharpshooters and skirmishers, the grey chafing cavalry, the grey masses of unemployed infantry, all held breath and listened. The sound was not three miles away, and it was the sound of the crash of long battle-lines. There was a curious movement among the men nearest the grey general-commanding. With their bodies bent forward, they looked his way, expecting short, quick orders. He rested immobile, his eyes just gleaming beneath the down-drawn cap, Little Sorrel cropping the marsh grass beside him. Munford, coming up, ventured a remark. "General Longstreet or General A. P. Hill has joined with their centre, I suppose, general? The firing is very heavy."

"Yes. The troops that have been lying before Richmond. General Lee will see that they do what is right."

Stafford, near him, spoke again. "The sound comes, I think, sir, from a place called Glendale--Glendale or Frayser's Farm."

"Yes, sir," said Jackson; "very probably."

The thunder never lessened. Artillery and infantry, Franklin's corps on the south bank of White Oak, began again to pour an iron hail against the opposing guns and the working party at the bridge, but in every interval between the explosions from these cannon there rolled louder and louder the thunder from Frayser's Farm. A sound like a grating wind in a winter forest ran through the idle grey brigades. "It's A. P. Hill's battle again!--A. P. Hill or Longstreet! Magruder and Huger and Holmes and A. P. Hill and Longstreet--and we out of it again, on the wrong side of White Oak Swamp! And they're looking for us to help--Wish I was dead!"

The 65th Virginia had its place some distance up the stream, in a tangled wood by the water. Facing southward, it held the extreme right; beyond it only morass, tall trees, swaying masses of vine. On the left an arm of the creek, thickly screened by tree and bush, divided it from the remainder of the brigade. It rested in semi-isolation, and its ten companies stared in anger at the narrow stream and the deep woods beyond, listening to the thunder of Longstreet and A. P. Hill's unsupported attack and the answering roar of the Federal 3d Army Corps. It was a sullen noise, deep and unintermittent. The 65th, waiting for orders, could have wept as the orders did not come. "Get across? Well, if General Jackson would just give us leave to try!--Oh, hell! listen to that!--Colonel, can't you do something for us?--Where's the colonel gone?"

Cleave was beyond their vision. He had rounded a little point of land and now, Dundee's hoofs in water, stood gazing at the darkly wooded opposite shore. He stood a moment thus, then spoke to the horse, and they entered the stream. It was not deep, and though there were obstructions, old stakes and drowned brushwood, Cleave and Dundee crossed. The air was full of booming sound, but there was no motion in the wood into which they rose from the water. All its floor was marshy, water in pools and threads, a slight growth of cane, and above, the tall and solemn trees. Cleave saw that there was open meadow beyond. Dismounting, he went noiselessly to the edge of the swamp. An open space, covered with some low growth; beyond it a hillside. Wood and meadow and hill, all lay quiet and lonely in the late sunlight.

He went back to Dundee, remounted, passed again through the sombre wood, over the boggy earth, entered the water and recrossed. Turning the little point of the swamp, he rode before his regiment on his way to find Winder. His men greeted him. "Colonel, if you could just get us over there we'd do anything in the world for you! This weeping-willow place is getting awful hard to bear! Look at Dundee! Even he's drooping his head. You know we'd follow you through hell, sir; and if you could just manage it so's we could follow you through White Oak Swamp--"

Cleave passed the arm of the creek separating the 65th from the rest of the brigade, and asked of Winder from the first troops beyond the screen of trees. "General Winder has ridden down to the bridge to see General Jackson."

Cleave, following, found his leader indeed before Jackson, just finishing his representations whatever they were, and somewhat perturbed by the commanding general's highly developed silence. This continuing unbroken, Winder, after an awkward minute of waiting, fell a little back, a flush on his cheeks and his lips hard together. The action disclosed Cleave, just come up, his hand checking Dundee, his grey eyes earnestly upon Jackson. When the latter spoke, it was not to the brigadier but to the colonel of the 65th. "Why are you not with your regiment, sir?"

"I left it but a moment ago, sir, to bring information I thought it my duty to bring."

"What information?"

"The 65th is on General Winder's extreme right, sir. The stream before it is fordable."

"How do you know, sir?"

"I forded it. The infantry could cross without much difficulty. The 65th would be happy, sir, to lead the way."

Winder opened his lips. "The whole Stonewall Brigade is ready, sir."

Jackson, without regarding, continued to address himself to Cleave. His tone had been heard before by the latter--in his own case on the night of the twenty-seventh as well as once before, and in the case of others where there had been what was construed as remonstrance or negligence or disobedience. He had heard him speak so to Garnett after Kernstown. The words were simple enough--they always were. "You will return to your duty, sir. It lies where your regiment is, and that is not here. Go!"

Cleave obeyed. The ford was there. His regiment might have crossed, the rest of the Stonewall following. Together they might traverse the swamp and the bit of open, pass the hillside, and strike Franklin upon the flank, while, brigade by brigade, the rest of the division followed by that ford. Rout Franklin, and push forward to help A. P. Hill. It had appeared his duty to give the information he was possessed of. He had given it, and his skirts were cleared. There was anger in him as he turned away; he had a compressed lip, a sparkling eye. Not till he turned did he see Stafford, sitting his horse in the shadow behind Jackson. The two men stared full at each other for a perceptible moment. But Stafford's face was in the shadow, and as for Cleave his mind was full of anger for the tragedy of the inaction. At the moment he gave small attention to his own life, its heights or depths, past or future. He saw Stafford, but he could not be said to consider him at all. He turned from the road into the wood, and pushed the great bay over spongy ground toward the isolated 65th. Stafford saw that he gave him no thought, and it angered him. On the highroad of his life it would not have done so, but he had left the road and was lost in the jungle. There were few things that Richard Cleave might do which would not now work like madness on the mind astray in that place.

The cannonading over White Oak Swamp continued, and the sound of the battle of Frayser's Farm continued. On a difficult and broken ground Longstreet attacked, driving back McCall's division. McCall was reinforced and Longstreet hard pressed. Lee loosed A. P. Hill, and the battle became furious. He looked for Jackson, but Jackson was at White Oak Swamp; for Huger, but a road covered with felled trees delayed Huger; for Magruder, but in the tangle of wood and swamp Magruder, too, went astray; for Holmes, but Fitz John Porter held Holmes in check. Longstreet and A. P. Hill strove unsupported, fifty thousand grey troops in hearing of their guns. The battle swayed to and fro, long, loud, and sanguinary, with much hand-to-hand work, much use of bayonets, and, over all, a shriek of grape and canister.

Back on White Oak Swamp, Franklin on the southern side, Jackson on the northern, blue and grey alike caught the noise of battle. They themselves were cannonading loudly and continuously. One Federal battery used fifteen hundred rounds. The grey were hardly less lavish. Not much damage was done except to the trees. The trough through which crept the sluggish water was filled with smoke. It drifted through the swamp and the woods and along the opposing hillsides. It drifted over and about the idle infantry, until one command was hidden from another.

Stonewall Jackson, seated on the stump of a felled oak, his sabre across his knees, his hands rigid upon it, his great booted feet squarely planted, his cap drawn low, sent the aide beside him with some order to the working party at the bridge. A moment later the courier went, too, to D. H. Hill, with a query about prisoners. The thunders continued, the smoke drifted heavily, veiling all movements. Jackson spoke without turning. "Whoever is there--"

No one was there at the moment but Maury Stafford. He came forward. "You will find the 1st Brigade," said Jackson. "Tell General Winder to move it nearer the stream. Tell him to cross from his right, with caution, a small reconnoitring party. Let it find out the dispositions of the enemy, return and report."

Stafford went, riding westward through the smoke-filled forest, and came presently to the Stonewall Brigade and to Winder, walking up and down disconsolately. "An order from General Jackson, sir. You will move your brigade nearer the stream. Also you will cross, from your right, with caution, a small reconnoitring party. It will discover the dispositions of the enemy, return and report."

"Very good," said Winder. "I'll move at once. The 65th is already on the brink--there to the right, beyond the swamp. Perhaps, you'll take the order on to Colonel Cleave?--Very good! Tell him to send a picked squad quietly across and find out what he can. I hope to God there'll come another order for us all to cross at its heels!"

Stafford, riding on, presently found himself in a strip of bog and thicket and tall trees masking a narrow, sluggish piece of water. The brigade behind him was hidden, the regiment in front not yet visible. Despite the booming of the guns, there was here an effect of stillness. It seemed a lonely place. Stafford, traversing it slowly because the ground gave beneath his horse's feet, became aware of a slight movement in a laurel thicket and of two eyes gleaming behind the leaves. He reined in his horse. "What are you doing in there? Straggling or deserting? Come out!" There was a pause; then Steve Dagg emerged. "Major, I ain't either stragglin' or desertin'. I was just seperated--I got seperated last night. The regiment's jes' down there--I crept down an' saw it jes' now. I'm goin' back an' join right away--send me to hell if I ain't!--though Gawd knows my foot's awful sore--"

Stafford regarded him closely. "I've seen you before. Ah, I remember! On the Valley pike, moving toward Winchester.... Poor scoundrel!"

Steve, his back against a swamp magnolia, undertook to show that he, too, remembered, and that gratefully. "Yes, sir. You saved me from markin' time on a barrel-head, major--an' my foot was sore--an' I wasn't desertin' that time any more'n this time--an' I was as obleeged to you as I could be. The colonel's awful hard on the men."

"Is he?" said Stafford gratingly. "They seem to like him."

He sat his horse before the laurel thicket and despised himself for holding conference with this poor thief; or, rather, some fibre in his brain told him that, out of this jungle, if ever he came out of it, he would despise himself. Had he really done so now, he would have turned away. He did not so; he sat in the heart of the jungle and compared hatreds with Steve.

The latter glanced upward a moment with his ferret eyes, then turned his head aside and spat. "If there's any of my way of thinkin' they don't like him--But they're all fools! Crept down through the swamp a little ago an' heard it! 'Colonel, get us across, somehow, won't you? We'll fight like hell!' 'I can't, men. I haven't any orders.' Yaah! I wish he'd take the regiment over without them, and then be court-martialled and shot for doing it!" Steve spat again. "I seed long ago that you didn't like him either, major. He gets along too fast--all the prizes come his way."

"Yes," said Stafford, from the heart of the jungle. "They come his way.... And he's standing there at the edge of the water, hoping for orders to cross."

Steve, beneath the swamp magnolia, had a widening of the lips. "Luck's turned agin him one way, though. He's out of favour with Old Jack. The regiment don't know why, but it saw it mighty plain day before yesterday, after the big battle! Gawd knows I'd like to see him so deep in trouble he'd never get out--and so would you, major. Prizes would stop coming his way then, and he might lose those he has--"

"If I entertain a devil," said Stafford, "I'll not be hypocrite enough to object to his conversation. Nor, if I take his suggestion, is there any sense in covering him with reprobation. So go your way, miserable imp! while I go mine!"

But Steve kept up with him, half-running at his stirrup. "I got to rejoin, 'cause it's jest off one battlefield on to another, and there ain't nowhere else to go! This world's a sickenin' place for men like me. So I've got to rejoin. Ef there's ever anything I kin do for you, major--"

At the head of the dividing arm of the creek they heard behind them a horseman, and waited for a courier to come up. "You are going on to the 65th?"

"Yes, sir. I belong there. I was kept by General Winder for some special duty, and I'm just through it--"

"I have an order," said Stafford, "from General Winder to Colonel Cleave. There are others to carry and time presses. I'll entrust it to you. Listen now, and get it straight."

He gave an order. The courier listened, nodded energetically, repeated it after him, and gathered up the reins. "I am powerfully glad to carry that order, sir! It means 'Cross,' doesn't it?"

He rode off, southward to the stream, in which direction Steve had already shambled. Stafford returned, through wood and swamp, to the road by the bridge. Above and around the deep inner jungle his intellect worked. He knew that he had done a villainy; knew it and did not repent. A nature, fine enough in many ways, lay bound hand and foot, deep in miasmas and primal heat, captive to a master and consuming passion. To create a solitude where he alone might reach one woman's figure, he would have set a world afire. He rode back now, through the woods, to a general commanding who never forgave nor listened overmuch to explanations, and he rode with quietude, the very picture of a gallant soldier.

Back on the edge of White Oak Swamp, Richard Cleave considered the order he had received. He found an ambiguity in the wording, a choice of constructions. He half turned to send the courier again to Winder, to make absolutely sure that the construction which he strongly preferred was correct. As he did so, though he could not see the brigade beyond the belt of trees, he heard it in motion, coming down through the woods to cross the stream in the rear of the 65th. He looked at the ford and the silent woods beyond. From Frayser's Farm, so short a distance away, came a deeper roll of thunder. It had a solemn and a pleading sound, How long are we to wait for any help? Cleave knit his brows; then, with a decisive gesture of his hand, he dismissed the doubt and stepped in front of his colour company. Attention! Into column. Forward!

On the road leading down to the bridge Stafford met his own division general, riding Rifle back to his command. "Hello, Major Stafford!" said Old Dick. "I thought I had lost you."

"General Jackson detained me, general."

"Yes, yes, you aren't the only one! But let me tell you, major, he's coming out of his spell!"

"You think it was a spell, then, sir?"

"Sure of it! Old Jackson simply hasn't been here at all. D. H. Hill thinks he's been broken down and ill--and somebody else is poetical and says his star never shines when another's is above it, which is nonsense--and somebody else thinks he thought we did enough in the Valley, which is damned nonsense--eh?"

"Of course, sir. Damned nonsense."

Ewell jerked his head. "Yes, sir. No man's his real self all the time--whether he's a Presbyterian or not. Old Jackson simply hasn't been in this cursed low country at all! But ----! I've been trying to give advice down there, and, by God, sir, he's approaching! If it was a spell, it's lifting! That bridge'll be built pretty soon, I reckon, and when we cross at last we'll cross with Stonewall Jackson going on before!"

XXXVI. MALVERN HILL

Star by star the heavens paled. The dawn came faintly and mournfully up from the east. Beneath it the battlefield of Frayser's Farm lay hushed and motionless, like the sad canvas of a painter, the tragic dream of a poet. It was far flung over broken ground and strewn with wrecks of war. Dead men and dying--very many of them, for the fighting had been heavy--lay stretched in the ghostly light, and beside them dead and dying horses. Eighteen Federal guns had been taken. They rested on ridged earth, black against the cold, grey sky. Stark and silent, far and wide, rolled the field beneath the cold, mysterious, changing light. Beside the dead men there were sleeping troops, regiments lying on their arms, fallen last night where they were halted, slumbering heavily through the dew-drenched summer night. As the sky grew purple and the last star went out, the bugles began to blow. The living men rose. If the others heard a reveille, it was in far countries.

Edward Cary, lying down in the darkness near one of the guns, had put out a hand and touched a bedfellow. The soldier seemed asleep, and Edward slept too, weary enough to have slept in Hades. Now, as the bugles called, he sat up and looked at his companion--who did not rise. "I thought you lay very still," said Edward. He sat a moment, on the dank earth, beside the still, grey figure. The gun stood a little above him; through a wheel as through a rose window he saw the flush of dawn. The dead soldier's eyes were open; they, too, stared through the gun-wheel at the dawn. Edward closed them. "I never could take death seriously," he said; "which is fortunate, I suppose."

Two hours later his regiment, moving down the Quaker road, came to a halt before a small, pillared, country church. A group of officers sat their horses near the portico. Lee was in front, quiet and grand. Out of the cluster Warwick Cary pushed his horse across to the halted regiment. Father and son were presently holding converse beneath a dusty roadside cedar. "I am thankful to see you!" said Edward. "We heard of the great charge you made. Please take better care of yourself, father!"

"The past week has been like a dream," answered the other; "one of those dreams in which, over and over, some undertaking, vital to you and tremendous, is about to march. Then, over and over, comes some pettiest obstacle, and the whole vast matter is turned awry."

"Yesterday should have been ours."

"Yes. General Lee had planned as he always plans. We should have crushed McClellan. Instead, we fought alone--and we lost four thousand men; and though we made the enemy lose as many, he has again drawn himself out of our grasp and is before us. I think that to-day we will have a fearful fight."

"Jackson is over at last."

"Yes, close behind us. Whiting is leading; I saw him a moment. There's a report that one of the Stonewall regiments crossed and was cut in pieces late yesterday afternoon--"

"I hope it wasn't Richard's!"

"I hope not. I have a curious, boding feeling about it.--There beat your drums! Good-bye, again--"

He leaned from his saddle and kissed his son, then backed his horse across the road to the generals by the pillared church. The regiment marched away, and as it passed it cheered General Lee. He lifted his hat. "Thank you, men. Do your best to-day--do your best."

"We'll mind you, Marse Robert, we'll mind you!" cried the troops, and went by shouting.

Somewhere down the Quaker Road the word "Malvern Hill" seemed to drop from the skies. "Malvern Hill. Malvern Hill. They're all massed on Malvern Hill. Three hundred and forty guns. And on the James the gunboats. Malvern Hill. Malvern Hill. Malvern Hill."

A man in line with Edward described the place. "My last year at William and Mary I spent Christmas at Westover. We hunted over all Malvern Hill. It rises one hundred and fifty feet, and the top's a mile across. About the base there are thick forests and swamps, and Turkey Creek goes winding, winding to the James. You see the James--the wide, old, yellow river, with the birds going screaming overhead. There were no gunboats on it that day, no Monitors, or Galenas, or Maritanzas, and if you'd told us up there on Malvern Hill that the next time we climbed it--! At Westover, after supper, they told Indian stories and stories of Tarleton's troopers, and in the night we listened for the tap of Evelyn Byrd's slipper on the stair. We said we heard it--anyhow, we didn't hear gunboats and three hundred thirty-two pounders!"

"'When only Beauty's eyes did rake us fore and aft, When only Beaux used powder, and Cupid's was the shaft--'"

sang Edward,

"'Most fatal was the war and pleasant to be slain--'"

Malvern Hill, beat out the marching feet. Malvern Hill. Malvern Hill. Malvern Hill.

There was a deep wood, out from which ran like spurs shallow ravines, clad with briar and bush and young trees; there was a stretch of rail fence; and there was a wheat field, where the grain stood in shocks. Because of the smoke, however, nothing could be seen plainly; and because of the most awful sound, few orders were distinctly heard. Evidently officers were shouting; in the rents of the veil one saw waved arms, open mouths, gesticulations with swords. But the loud-mouthed guns spoke by the score, and the blast bore the human voice away. The regiment in which was Edward Cary divined an order and ceased firing, lying flat in sedge and sassafras, while a brigade from the rear roared by. Edward looked at his fingers. "Barrel burn them?" asked a neighbour. "Reckon they use red-hot muskets in hell? Wish you could see your lips, Edward! Round black O. Biting cartridges for a living--and it used to be when you read Plutarch that you were all for the peaceful heroes! You haven't a lady-love that would look at you now!

"'Take, oh, take those lips away That so blackly are enshrined--'

Here comes a lamp-post--a lamp-post--a lamp-post!"

The gunboats on the river threw the "lamp-posts." The long and horrible shells arrived with a noise that was indescribable. A thousand shrieking rockets, perhaps, with at the end an explosion and a rain of fragments like rocks from Vesuvius. They had a peculiar faculty for getting on the nerves. The men watched their coming with something like shrinking, with raised arms and narrowed eyes. "Look out for the lamp-post--look out for the lamp-post--look out--Aaahhhh!"

Before long the regiment was moved a hundred yards nearer the wheat-field. Here it became entangled in the ebb of a charge--the brigade which had rushed by coming back, piecemeal, broken and driven by an iron flail. It would reform and charge again, but now there was confusion. All the field was confused, dismal and dreadful, beneath the orange-tinted smoke. The smoke rolled and billowed, a curtain of strange texture, now parting, now closing, and when it parted disclosing immemorial Death and Wounds with some attendant martial pageantry. The commands were split as by wedges, the uneven ground driving them asunder, and the belching guns. They went up to hell mouth, brigade by brigade, even regiment by regiment, and in the breaking and reforming and twilight of the smoke, through the falling of officers and the surging to and fro, the troops became interwoven, warp of one division, woof of another. The sound was shocking; when, now and then there fell a briefest interval it was as though the world had stopped, had fallen into a gulf of silence.

Edward Cary found beside him a man from another regiment, a small, slight fellow, young and simple. A shock of wheat gave both a moment's protection. "Hot work!" said Edward, with his fine camaraderie. "You made a beautiful charge. We almost thought you would take them."

The other looked at him vacantly. "I added up figures in the old warehouse," he said, in a high, thin voice. "I added up figures in the old warehouse, and when I went home at night I used to read plays. I added up figures in the old warehouse--Don't you remember Hotspur? I always liked him, and that part--

'To pluck bright honour from the pale-faced moon; Or dive into the bottom of the deep--'"

He stood up. Edward rose to his knees and put out a hand to draw him down. "It's enough to make you crazy, I'll confess--but you mustn't stand up like that!"

The downward drawing hand was too late. There were blue sharpshooters in a wood in front. A ball entered the clerk's breast and he sank down behind the wheat. "I added up figures in the old warehouse," he again told Cary, "and when I went home at night I read plays--"

The figure stiffened in Edward's grasp. He laid it down, and from behind the wheat shock watched a grey battery in process of being knocked to pieces. It had arrived in this quarter of the field in a wild gallop, and with a happy insouciance had unlimbered and run up the guns back of a little crest topped with sumach, taking pains meanwhile to assure the infantry that now it was safe. The infantry had grinned. "Like you first-rate, artillery! Willing to bet on the gunners, but the guns are a leetle small and few. Don't know that we feel so awful safe!"

The grey began. Four shells flew up the long slope and burst among the iron rows that made a great triple crown for Malvern Hill. The grey gunners cheered, and the appreciative infantry cheered, and the first began to reload while the second, flat in scrub and behind the wheat, condescended to praise. "Artillery does just about as well as can be expected! Awful old-fashioned arm--but well-meaning.... Look out--look... Eeehhh!"

The iron crown that had been blazing toward other points of the compass now blazed toward this. Adversity came to the insouciant grey battery, adversity quickening to disaster. The first thunder blast thickened to a howling storm of shrapnel, grape, and canister.

At the first gun gunner No. 1, ramming home a charge, was blown into fragments; at the second the arm holding the sponge staff was severed from gunner No. 3's shoulder. A great shell, bursting directly over the third, killed two men and horribly mangled others; the carriage of the fourth was crushed and set on fire. This in the beginning of the storm; as it swelled, total destruction threatened from the murk. The captain went up and down. "Try it a little longer, men. Try it a little longer, men. We've got to make up in quality, you know. We've got to make up in quality, you know. Marse Robert's looking--I see him over there! Try it a little longer--try it a little longer."

An aide arrived. "For God's sake, take what you've got left away! Yes, it's an order. Your being massacred won't help. Look out--Look--"

No one in battle ever took account of time or saw any especial reason for being, now here, and now in quite a different place, or ever knew exactly how the places had been exchanged. Edward was practically certain that he had taken part in a charge, that his brigade had driven a body of blue infantry from a piece of woods. At any rate they were no longer in the wheat field, but in a shady wood, where severed twigs and branches floated pleasantly down. Lying flat, chin on hand, he watched a regiment storm and take a thick abattis--felled trees filled with sharpshooters--masking a hastily thrown up earthwork. The regiment was reserving its fire and losing heavily. An elderly man led it, riding a large old steady horse. "That's Ex-Governor Smith," said the regiment in the wood. "That's Extra Billy! He's a corker! Next time he runs he's going to get all the votes--"

The regiment tried twice to pass the abattis, but each time fell back. The brigadier had ordered it not to fire until it was past the trees; it obeyed, but sulkily enough. Men were dropping; the colour-bearer went down. There was an outcry. "Colonel! we can't stand this! We'll all get killed before we fire a shot! The general don't know how we're fixed--" Extra Billy agreed with them. He rose in his stirrups, turned and nodded vigorous assent. "Of course you can't stand it, boys! You oughtn't to be expected to. It's all this infernal tactics and West P'int tomfoolery! Damn it, fire! and flush the game!"

Edward laughed. From the fuss it was apparent that the abattis and earthwork had succumbed. At any rate, the old governor and his regiment were gone. He was of the colour-guard, and all the colour-guard were laughing. "Didn't you ever see him go into battle with his old blue umbrella up! Trotting along same as to a caucus--whole constituency following! Fine old political Roman! Look out, Yedward! Whole pine tree coming down."

The scene changed again, and it was the side of a ravine, with a fine view of the river and with Morell and Couch blazing somewhere above. The shells went overhead, bellowing monsters charging a grey battery on a hillock and a distant line of troops. "That's Pegram--that battery," said some one. "He does well." "Has any one any idea of the time?" asked another. "Sun's so hidden there's no guessing. Don't believe we'll ever see his blessed light again."

A fisherman from the Eastern Shore stated that it was nearly five o'clock. "Fogs can't fool me. Day's drawing down, and tide's going out--"

The lieutenant-colonel appeared. "Somebody with an order has been shot, coming through the cornfield toward us. Three volunteers to bring him in!"

Edward and the Eastern Shore man and a lean and dry and middle-aged lawyer from King and Queen bent their heads beneath their shoulders and plunged into the corn. All the field was like a miniature abattis, stalk and blade shot down and crossed and recrossed in the wildest tangle. To make way over it was difficult enough, and before the three had gone ten feet the minies took a hand. The wounded courier lay beneath his horse, and the horse screamed twice, the sound rising above the roar of the guns. A ball pierced Edward's cap, another drew blood from the lawyer's hand. The fisherman was a tall and wiry man; as he ran he swayed like a mast in storm. The three reached the courier, dragged him from beneath the horse, and found both legs crushed. He looked at them with lustreless eyes. "You can't do anything for me, boys. The general says please try to take those three guns up there. He's going to charge the line beyond, and they are in the way."

"All right, we will," said the lawyer. "Now you put one arm round Cary's neck and one round mine--"

But the courier shook his head. "You leave me here. I'm awful tired. You go take the guns instead. Ain't no use, I tell you. I'd like to see the children, but--"

In the act of speaking, as they lifted him, a ball went through his throat. The three laid the body down, and, heads bent between shoulders, ran over and through the corn toward the ravine. Two thirds of the way across, the fisherman was shot. He came to his knees and, in falling, clutched Edward. "Mast's overboard," he cried, in a rattling voice. "Cut her loose, damn you!--I'll take the helm--" He, too, died. Cary and the lawyer got back to the gully and gave the order.

The taking of those guns was no simple matter. It resembled child's play only in the single-mindedness and close attention which went to its accomplishment. The regiment that reached them at last and took them, and took what was left of the blue gunners, was not much more than half a regiment. The murk up here on this semi-height was thick to choking; the odour and taste of the battle poisoned brass on the tongue, the colour that of a sand storm, the heat like that of a battleship in action, and all the place shook from the thunder and recoil of the tiers of great guns beyond, untaken, not to be taken. A regiment rushed out of the rolling smoke, by the half regiment. "Mississippi! Mississippi!--Well, even Mississippi isn't going to do the impossible!" As the line went by, tall and swinging and yelling itself hoarse, the colonel was wounded and fell. The charge went on while the officer--he was an old man, very stately looking--dragged himself aside, and sitting in the sedge tied a large bright handkerchief above a wound in his leg. The charge dashed itself against the hillside, and the tier of guns flamed a death's sickle and mowed it down. Breathless, broken, the regiment fell back. When it reached the old man with the bright handkerchief, it would have lifted him and carried him with it to the rear. He would not go. He said, "Tell the 21st they can't get me till they take those guns!"

The 21st mended its gaps and charged again. The old man set his hat on his sword, waved it in the air, and cheered his men as they passed. They passed him but to return. To go up against those lines of bellowing guns was mere heroic madness. Bleeding, exhausted, the men put out their hands for the old man. He drew his revolver. "I'll shoot anybody who touches me! Tell the 21st they can't get their colonel till they take those guns!"

The 21st charged a third time, in vain. It came back--a part of it came back. The old man had fainted, and his men lifted and bore him away.

From the platform where he lay in the shadow of the three guns Edward Cary looked out over Malvern Hill, the encompassing lowland, marsh and forest and fields, the winding Turkey Creek and Western Creek, and to the south the James. A wind had sprung up and was blowing the battle smoke hither and yon. Here it hung heavily, and here a long lane was opened. The sun was low and red behind a filmy veil, dark and ragged like torn crape. He saw four gunboats on the river; they were throwing the long, howling shells. The Monitor was there, an old foe--the cheese box on a shingle. Edward shut his eyes and saw again Hampton Roads, and how the Monitor had looked, darting from behind the Minnesota. The old turtle, the old Merrimac ... and now she lay, a charred hull, far, far beneath the James, by Craney Island.

The private on his right was a learned man. Edward addressed him. "Have you ever thought, doctor, how fearfully dramatic is this world?"

"Yes. It's one of those facts that are too colossal to be seen. Shakespeare says all the world's a stage. That's only a half-truth. The world's a player, like the rest of us."

Below this niche stretched the grey battle-lines; above it, on the hilltop, by the cannon and over half the slope beneath, spread the blue. A forest stood behind the grey; out of it came the troops to the charge, the flags tossing in front. The upward reaching fingers of coppice and brush had their occupants, fragments of commands under cover, bands of sharpshooters. And everywhere over the open, raked by the guns, were dead and dying men. They lay thickly. Now and again the noise of the torment of the wounded made itself heard--a most doleful and ghostly sound coming up like a wail from the Inferno. There were, too, many dead or dying horses. Others, still unhurt, galloped from end to end of the field of death. In the wheat-field there were several of the old, four-footed warriors, who stood and ate of the shocked grain. There arrived a hush over the battlefield, one of those pauses which occur between exhaustion and renewed effort, effort at its height. The guns fell silent, the musketry died away, the gunboats ceased to throw those great shells. By contrast with the clangour that had prevailed, the stillness seemed that of a desert waste, a dead world. Over toward a cross-road there could be made out three figures on horseback. The captain of Edward's company was an old college mate; lying down with his men, he now drew himself over the ground and loaned Cary his field-glass. "It's General Lee and General Jackson and General D. H. Hill."

A body of grey troops came to occupy a finger of woods below the three captured guns. "That's Cary's Legion," said the captain. "Here comes the colonel now!"

The two commands were but a few yards apart. Fauquier Cary, dismounting, walked up the sedgy slope and asked to speak to his nephew. The latter left the ranks, and the two found a trampled space beside one of the great thirty-two pounders. A dead man or two lay in the parched grass, but there was nothing else to disturb. The quiet yet held over North and South and the earth that gave them standing room. "I have but a moment," said the elder man. "This is but the hush before the final storm. We came by Jackson's troops, and one of his officers whom I knew at the Point rode beside me a little way. They all crossed White Oak Swamp by starlight this morning, and apparently Jackson is again the Jackson of the Valley. It was a curious eclipse. The force of the man is such that, while his officers acknowledge the eclipse, it makes no difference to them. He is Stonewall Jackson--and that suffices. But that is not what I have to tell--"

"I saw father a moment this morning. He said there was a rumour about one of the Stonewall regiments--"

"Yes. It was the 65th."

"Cut to pieces?"

"Yes."

"Richard--Richard was not killed?"

"No. But many were. Hairston Breckinridge was killed--and some of the Thunder Run men--and very many others. Almost destroyed, Carlton said. They crossed at sunset. There were a swamp and a wood and a hollow commanded by hills. The enemy was in force behind the hill, and there was beside a considerable command in ambush, concealed in the woods by the swamp. These had a gun or two. All opened on the 65th. It was cut to pieces in the swamp and in a little marshy meadow. Only a remnant got back to the northern side of the creek. Richard is under arrest."

"He was acting under orders!"

"So Carlton says he says. But General Jackson says there was no such order; that he disobeyed the order that was given, and now tries to screen himself. Carlton says Jackson is more steel-like than usual, and we know how it fared with Garnett and with others. There will be a court-martial. I am very anxious."

"I am not," said Edward stoutly. "There will be an honourable acquittal. We must write and tell Judith that she's not to worry! Richard Cleave did nothing that he should not have done."

"Of course, we know that. But Carlton says that, on the face of it, it's an ugly affair. And General Jackson--Well, we can only await developments."

"Poor Judith!--and his sister and mother.... Poor women!"

The other made a gesture of assent and sorrow. "Well, I must go back. Take care of yourself, Edward. There will be the devil's own work presently."

He went, and Edward returned to his fellows. The silence yet held over the field; the westering sun glowed dull red behind the smoke; the three figures rested still by the cross-roads; the mass of frowning metal topped Malvern Hill like a giant, smoke-wreathed chevaux de frise. Out of the brushwood to the left of the regiment, straight by it, upward towards the guns, and then at a tangent off through the fields to the woods, sped a rabbit. Legs to earth, it hurried with all its might. The regiment was glad of a diversion--the waiting was growing so intolerable. The men cheered the rabbit. "Go it, Molly Cottontail!--Go it, Molly!--Go it, Molly!--Hi! Don't go that-away! Them's Yankees! They'll cut your head off! Go t'other way--that's it! Go it, Molly! Damn! If't wasn't for my character, I'd go with you!"

The rabbit disappeared. The regiment settled back to waiting, a very intolerable employment. The sun dipped lower and lower. The hush grew portentous. The guns looked old, mailed, dead warriors; the gunboats sleeping forms; the grey troops battle-lines in a great war picture, the three horsemen by the cross-roads a significant group in the same; the dead and wounded over all the fields, upon the slope, in the woods, by the marshes, the jetsam, still and heavy, of war at its worst. For a moment longer the wide and dreary stretch rested so, then with a wild suddenness sound and furious motion rushed upon the scene. The gunboats recommenced with their long and horrible shells. A grey battery opened on Berdan's sharpshooters strung in a line of trees below the great crown of guns. The crown flamed toward the battery, scorched and mangled it. By the cross-roads the three figures separated, going in different directions. Presently galloping horses--aides, couriers--crossed the plane of vision. They went from D. H. Hill in the centre to Jackson's brigades on the left and Magruder's on the right. They had a mile of open to cross, and the iron crown and the sharpshooters flamed against them. Some galloped on and gave the orders. Some threw up their arms and fell, or, crashing to earth with a wounded horse, disentangled themselves and stumbled on through the iron rain. The sun drew close to the vast and melancholy forests across the river. Through a rift in the smoke, there came a long and crimson shaft. It reddened the river, then struck across the shallows to Malvern Hill, suffused with a bloody tinge wood and field and the marshes by the creeks, then splintered against the hilltop and made a hundred guns to gleam. The wind heightened, lifting the smoke and driving it northward. It bared to the last red light the wild and dreary battlefield.

From the centre rose the Confederate yell. Rodes's brigade, led by Gordon, charged. It had half a mile of open to cross, and it was caught at once in the storm that howled from the crest of Malvern Hill. Every regiment suffered great loss; the 3d Alabama saw half its number slain or wounded. The men yelled again, and sprang on in the teeth of the storm. They reached the slope, almost below the guns. Gordon looked behind for the supporting troops which Hill had promised. They were coming, that grim fighter leading them, but they were coming far off, under clanging difficulties, through a hell of shrapnel. Rodes's brigade alone could not wrest that triple crown from the hilltop--no, not if the men had been giants, sons of Anak! They were halted; they lay down, put muskets to shoulder and fired steadily and fired again on the blue infantry.

It grew darker on the plain. Brigades were coming from the left, the right, the centre. There had been orders for a general advance. Perhaps the aides carrying them were among the slain, perhaps this, perhaps that. The event was that brigades charged singly--sometimes even regiments crossed, with a cry, the twilight, groaning plain and charged Malvern Hill unsupported. The place flamed death and destruction. Hill's ten thousand men pressed forward with the order of a review. The shot and shell met them like a tornado. The men fell by hundreds. The lines closed, rushed on. The Federal infantry joined the artillery. Musketry and cannon, the din became a prolonged and fearful roar of battle.

The sun disappeared. There sprang out in the western sky three long red bands of clouds. On the darkening slope and plain Hill was crushed back, before and among his lines a horror of exploding shells. Jackson threw forward Lawton and Whiting, Winder and the Louisiana troops, while on the right, brigade after brigade, Magruder hurled across the plain nine brigades. After Hill, Magruder's troops bore the brunt of the last fearful fighting.

They stormed across the plain in twilight that was lit by the red flashes from the guns. The clouds of smoke were red-bosomed; the red bars stayed in the west. The guns never ceased their thundering, the musketry to roll. Death swung a wide scythe in the twilight of that first day of July. Anderson and Armistead, Barksdale, Semmes and Kershaw, Wright and Toombs and Mahone, rushed along the slope of Malvern Hill, as Ripley and Garland and Gordon and all the brigadiers of D. H. Hill had rushed before them. Death, issuing from that great power of artillery, laid the soldiers in swathes. The ranks closed, again and again the ranks closed; with diminished numbers but no slackening of courage, the grey soldiers again dashed themselves against Malvern Hill. The red bars in the west faded slowly to a deep purple; above them, in a clear space of sky, showed the silver Venus. Upon her cooling globe, in a day to come, intelligent life might rend itself as here--the old horror, the old tragedy, the old stained sublimity over again! All the drifting smoke was now red lit, and beneath it lay in their blood elderly men, and men in their prime, and young men--very many, oh, very many young men! As the night deepened there sprang, beneath the thunder, over all the field a sound like wind in reeds. It was a sighing sound, a low and grievous sound. The blue lost heavily, for the charges were wildly heroic; but the guns were never disabled, and the loss of the grey was the heaviest. Brigade by brigade, the grey faced the storm and were beaten back, only again to reel forward upon the slope where Death stood and swung his scythe. The last light dwelt on their colours, on the deep red of their battle-flags; then the western sky became no warmer than the eastern. The stars were out in troops; the battle stopped.

D. H. Hill, an iron fighter with a mania for personal valour, standing where he had been standing for an hour, in a pleasantly exposed spot, clapped on his hat and beckoned for his horse. The ground about him showed furrowed as for planting, and a neighbouring oak tree was so riddled with bullets that the weight of a man might have sent it crashing down. D. H. Hill, drawing long breath, spoke half to his staff, half to the stars: "Give me Federal artillery and Confederate infantry, and I'd whip the world!"

XXXVII. A WOMAN

Allan Gold, lying in a corner of the Stonewall Hospital, turned his head toward the high window. It showed him little, merely a long strip of blue sky above housetops. The window was open, and the noises of the street came in. He knew them, checked them off in his mind. He was doing well. A body, superbly healthful, might stand out boldly against a minie ball or two, just as calm nerves, courage and serene judgement were of service in a war hospital such as this. If he was restless now, it was because he was wondering about Christianna. It was an hour past her time for coming.

The ward was fearfully crowded. This, however, was the end by the stair, and he had a little cut-off place to himself. Many in the ward yet lay on the floor, on a blanket as he had done that first morning. In the afternoon of that day a wide bench had been brought into his corner, a thin flock mattress laid upon it, and he himself lifted from the floor. He had protested that others needed a bed much more, that he was used to lying on the earth--but Christianna had been firm. He wondered why she did not come.

Chickahominy, Gaines's Mill, Garnett's and Golding's farms, Peach Orchard, Savage Station, White Oak Swamp, Frayser's Farm, Malvern Hill--dire echoes of the Seven Days' fighting had thronged into this hospital as into all others, as into the houses of citizens and the public buildings and the streets! All manner of wounded soldiers told the story--ever so many soldiers and ever so many variants of the story. The dead bore witness, and the wailing of women which was now and then heard in the streets; not often, for the women were mostly silent, with pressed lips. And the ambulances jolting by--and the sound of funerals--and the church bells tolling, tolling--all these bore witness. And day and night there was the thunder of the cannon. From Mechanicsville and Gaines's Mill it had rolled near and loud, from Savage Station somewhat less so; White Oak Swamp and Frayser's Farm had carried the sound yet further off, and from Malvern Hill it came but distantly. But loud or low, near or far, day by day and into each night, Richmond heard the cannon. At first the vibration played on the town's heart, like a giant hand on giant strings. But at last the tune grew old and the town went about its business. There was so much to do! One could not stop to listen to cannon. Richmond was a vast hospital; pain and fever in all places, and, around, the shadow of death. Hardly a house but mourned a kinsman or kinsmen; early and late the dirges wailed through the streets. So breathlessly filled were the days, that often the dead were buried at night. The weather was hot--days and nights hot, close and still. Men and women went swiftly through them, swift and direct as weavers' shuttles. Privation, early comrade of the South, was here; scant room, scant supplies, not too much of wholesome food for the crowded town, few medicines or alleviatives, much to be done and done at once with the inadequatest means. There was little time in which to think in general terms; all effort must go toward getting done the immediate thing. The lift and tension of the time sloughed off the immaterial weak act or thought. There were present a heroic simplicity, a naked verity, a full cup of service, a high and noble altruism. The plane was epic, and the people did well.

The sky within Allan's range of vision was deep blue; the old brick gable-ends of houses, mellow and old, against it. A soldier with a broken leg and a great sabre cut over the head, just brought into the ward, brought with him the latest news. He talked loudly, and all down the long room, crowded to suffocation, the less desperately wounded raised themselves on their elbows to hear. Others, shot through stomach or bowels, or fearfully torn by shells, or with the stumps of amputated limbs not doing well, raved on in delirium or kept up their pitiful moaning. The soldier raised his voice higher, and those leaning on elbows listened with avidity. "Evelington Heights? Where's Evelington Heights?"--"Between Westover and Rawling's millpond, near Malvern Hill!"--"Malvern Hill! That was ghastly!"--"Go on, sergeant-major! We're been pining for a newspaper."

"Were any of you boys at Malvern Hill?"

"Yes,--only those who were there ain't in a fix to tell about it! That man over there--and that one--and that one--oh, a middling lot! They're pretty badly off--poor boys!"

From a pallet came a hollow voice. "I was at Malvern Hill, and I ain't never going there again--I ain't never going there again--I ain't never.... Who's that singing? I kin sing, too--

'The years creep slowly by, Lorena; The snow is on the grass again; The sun's low down the sky, Lorena; The frost gleams where the flowers have been--'"

"Don't mind him," said the soldiers on elbows. "Poor fellow! he ain't got any voice anyhow. We know about Malvern Hill. Malvern Hill was pretty bad. And we heard there'd been a cavalry rumpus--Jeb Stuart and Sweeney playing their tricks! We didn't know the name of the place. Evelington Heights! Pretty name."

The sergeant-major would not be cheated of Malvern Hill. "'Pretty bad!' I should say 'twas pretty bad! Malvern Hill was awful. If anything could induce me to be a damn Yankee 'twould be them guns of their'n! Yes, sirree, bob! we fought and fought, and ten o'clock came and there wasn't any moon, and we stopped. And in the night-time the damn Yankees continued to retreat away. There was an awful noise of gun-wheels all the night long--so the sentries said, and the surgeons and the wounded and, I reckon, the generals. The rest of us, we were asleep. I don't reckon there ever was men any more tired. Malvern Hill was--I can't swear because there are ladies nursing us, but Malvern Hill was--Well, dawn blew at reveille--No, doctor, I ain't getting light-headed. I just get my words a little twisted. Reveille blew at dawn, and there were sheets of cold pouring rain, and everywhere there were dead men, dead men, dead men lying there in the wet, and the ambulances were wandering round like ghosts of wagons, and the wood was too dripping to make a fire, and three men out of my mess were killed, and one was a boy that we'd all adopted, and it was awful discouraging. Yes, we were right tired, damn Yankees and all of us.... Doctor, if I was you I wouldn't bother about that leg. It's all right as it is, and you might hurt me.... Oh, all right! Kin I smoke?... Yuugh! Well, boys, the damn Yankees continued their retreat to Harrison's Landing, where their hell-fire gunboats could stand picket for them.... Say, ma'am, would you kindly tell me why that four-post bed over there is all hung with wreaths of roses?--'Isn't any bed there?' But there is! I see it.... Evelington Heights--and Stuart dropping shells into the damn Yankees' camp.... They are roses, the old Giants of Battle by the beehive.... Evelington Heights. Eveling--Well, the damn Yankees dragged their guns up there, too.... If the beehive's there, then the apple tree's here--Grandma, if you'll ask him not to whip me I'll never take them again, and I'll hold your yarn every time you want me to--"

The ward heard no more about Evelington Heights. It knew, however, that it had been no great affair; it knew that McClellan with his exhausted army, less many thousand dead, wounded, and prisoners, less fifty-two guns and thirty-five thousand small arms, less enormous stores captured or destroyed, less some confidence at Washington, rested down the James by Westover, in the shadow of gunboats. The ward guessed that, for a time at least, Richmond was freed from the Northern embrace. It knew that Lee and his exhausted army, less even more of dead and wounded than had fallen on the other side, rested between that enemy and Richmond. Lee was watching; the enemy would come no nearer for this while. For all its pain, for all the heat, the blood, the fever, thirst and woe, the ward, the hospital, all the hospitals, experienced to-day a sense of triumph. It was so with the whole city. Allan knew this, lying, looking with sea-blue eyes at the blue summer sky and the old and mellow roofs. The city mourned, but also it rejoiced. There stretched the black thread, but twisted with it was the gold. A paean sounded as well as a dirge. Seven days and nights of smoke and glare upon the horizon, of the heart-shaking cannon roar, of the pouring in of the wounded, of processions to Hollywood, of anguish, ceaseless labour, sick waiting, dizzy hope, descending despair.... Now, at last, above it all the bells rang for victory. A young girl, coming through the ward, had an armful of flowers,--white lilies, citron aloes, mignonette, and phlox--She gave her posies to all who stretched out a hand, and went out with her smiling face. Allan held a great stalk of garden phlox, white and sweet. It carried him back to the tollgate and to the log schoolhouse by Thunder Run.... Twelve o'clock. Was not Christianna coming at all?

This was not Judith Cary's ward, but now she entered it. Allan, watching the narrow path between the wounded, saw her coming from the far door. He did not know who she was; he only looked from the flower in his hand and had a sense of strength and sweetness, of something noble approaching nearer. She paused to ask a question of one of the women; answered, she came straight on. He saw that she was coming to the cut-off corner by the stair, and instinctively he straightened a little the covering over him. In a moment she was standing beside him, in her cool hospital dress, with her dark hair knotted low, with a flower at her breast. "You are Allan Gold?" she said.

"Yes."

"My name is Judith Cary. Perhaps you have heard of me. I have been to Lauderdale and to Three Oaks."

"Yes," said Allan. "I have heard of you. I--"

There was an empty box beside the wall. Judith drew it nearer to his bed and sat down. "You have been looking for Christianna? I came to tell you about poor little Christianna--and--and other things. Christianna's father has been killed."

Allan uttered an exclamation. "Isham Maydew! I never thought of his going!... Poor child!"

"So she thought she ought not to come to-day. Had there been strong reason, many people dependent upon her, she would have come."

"Poor Christianna--poor wild rose!... It's ghastly, this war! There is nothing too small and harmless for its grist."

"I agree with you. Nothing too great; nothing too small. Nothing too base, as there is nothing too noble."

"Isham Maydew! He was lean and tough and still, like Death in a picture. Where was he killed?"

"It was at White Oak Swamp. At White Oak Swamp, the day before Malvern Hill."

Allan looked at her. There was more in her voice than the non-coming of Christianna, than the death of Isham Maydew. She had spoken in a clear, low, bell-like tone that held somehow the ache of the world. He was simple and direct, and he spoke at once out of his thought. He knew that all the men of her house were at the front. "You have had a loss of your own?--"

She shook her head. "I? No. I have had no loss."

"Now," thought Allan, "there's something proud in it." He looked at her with his kindly, sea-blue eyes. In some chamber of the brain there flashed out a picture--the day of the Botetourt Resolutions, winter dusk after winter sunset and Cleave and himself going homeward over the long hilltop--with talk, among other things, of visitors at Lauderdale. This was "the beautiful one." He remembered the lift of Cleave's head and his voice. Judith's large dark eyes had been raised; transparent, showing always the soul within as did his own, they now met Allan's. "The 65th," she said, "was cut to pieces."

The words, dragged out as they were, left a shocked silence. Here, in the corner by the stair, the arch of wood partially obscuring the ward, with the still blue sky and the still brick gables, they seemed for the moment cut away from the world, met on desert sands to tell and hear a dreadful thing. "Cut to pieces," breathed Allan. "The 65th cut to pieces!"

The movement which he made displaced the bandage about his shoulder. She left the box, kneeled by him and straightened matters, then went back to her seat. "It was this way," she said,--and told him the story as she had heard it from her father and from Fauquier Cary. She spoke with simplicity, in the low, bell-like tone that held the ache of the world. Allan listened, with his hand over his eyes. His regiment that he loved!... all the old, familiar faces.

"Yes, he was killed--Hairston Breckinridge was killed, fighting gallantly. He died, they say, before he knew the trap they were caught in. And Christianna's father was killed, and others of the Thunder Run men, and very many from the county and from other counties. I do not know how many. Fauquier called it slaughter, said no worse thing has happened to any single command. Richard got what was left back across the swamp."

Allan groaned. "The 65th! General Jackson himself called it 'the fighting 65th!' Just a remnant of it left--left of the 65th!"

"Yes. The roll was called, and so many did not answer. They say other Stonewall regiments wept."

Allan raised himself upon the bench. She started forward. "Don't do that!" and with her hand pressed him gently down again. "I knew," she said, "that you were here, and I have heard Richard speak of you and say how good and likable you were. And I have worked hard all the morning, and just now I thought, 'I must speak to some one who knows and loves him or I will die.' And so I came. I knew that the ward might hear of the 65th any moment now and begin to talk of it, so I was not afraid of hurting you. But you must lie quiet."

"Very well, I will. I want to know about Richard Cleave--about my colonel."

Her dark eyes met the sea-blue ones fully. "He is under arrest," she said. "General Jackson has preferred charges against him."

"Charges of what?"

"Of disobedience to orders--of sacrificing the regiment--of--of retreating at last when he should not have done so and leaving his men to perish--of--of--. I have seen a copy of the charge. Whereas the said colonel of the 65th did shamefully--"

Her voice broke. "Oh, if I were God--"

There was a moment's silence--silence here in the corner by the stair, though none beyond in the painful, moaning ward. A bird sailed across the strip of blue sky; the stalk of phlox on the soldier's narrow bed lay withering in the light. Allan spoke. "General Jackson is very stern with failure. He may believe that charge. I don't see how he can; but if he made it he believes it. But you--you don't believe it?--"

"Believe it?" she said. "No more than God believes it! The question is now, how to help Richard."

"Have you heard from him?"

She took from her dress a folded leaf torn from a pocket-book. "You are his friend. You may read it. Wait, I will hold it." She laid it before him, holding it in her slight, fine, strong fingers.

He read. Judith: You will hear of the fate of the 65th. How it happened I do not yet understand. It is like death on my heart. You will hear, too, of my own trouble. As to me, believe only that I could sit beside you and talk to-day as we talked awhile ago, in the sunset. Richard.

She refolded the paper and put it back. "The evidence will clear him," said Allan. "It must. The very doubt is absurd."

Her face lightened. "General Jackson will see that he was hasty--unjust. I can understand such anger at first, but later, when he reflects--Richard will be declared innocent--"

"Yes. An honourable acquittal. It will surely be so."

"I am glad I came. You have always known him and been his friend."

"Let me tell you the kind of things I know of Richard Cleave. No, it doesn't hurt me to talk."

"I can stay a little longer. Yes, tell me."

Allan spoke at some length, in his frank, quiet voice. She sat beside him, with her cheek on her hand, the blue sky and old house roofs above her. When he ceased her eyes were full of tears. She would not let them fall. "If I began to cry I should never stop," she said, and smiled them away. Presently she rose. "I must go now. Christianna will be back to-morrow."

She went away, passing up the narrow path between the wounded and out at the further door. Allan watched her going, then turned a little on the flock bed, and lifting his unbandaged arm laid it across his eyes. The 65th cut to pieces--The 65th cut to pieces--

At sunset Judith went home. The small room up in the branches of the tulip tree--she hardly knew how many months or years she had inhabited it. There had passed, of course, only weeks--but Time had widened its measure. To all intents and purposes she had been a long while in Richmond. This high, quiet niche was familiar, familiar! familiar the old, slender, inlaid dressing-table and the long, thin curtains and the engraving of Charlotte Corday; familiar the cool, green tree without the window and the nest upon a bough; familiar the far view and wide horizon, by day smoke-veiled, by night red-lit. The smoke was lifted now; the eye saw further than it had seen for days. The room seemed as quiet as a tomb. For a moment the silence oppressed her, and then she remembered that it was because the cannon had stopped.

She sat beside the window, through the dusk, until the stars came out; then went downstairs and took her part at the table, about which the soldier sons of the house were gathering. They brought comrades with them. The wounded eldest son was doing well, the army was victorious, the siege was lifted, the house must be made gay for "the boys." No house was ever less bright for Judith. Now she smiled and listened, and the young men thought she did not realize the seriousness of the army talk about the 65th. They themselves were careful not to mention the matter. They talked of a thousand heroisms, a thousand incidents of the Seven Days; but they turned the talk--if any one, unwary, drew it that way--from White Oak Swamp. They mistook her feeling; she would rather they had spoken out. Her comfort was when, afterwards, she went for a moment into the "chamber" to see the wounded eldest. He was a warm-hearted, rough diamond, fond of his cousin.

"What's this damned stuff I hear about Richard Cleave and a court-martial? What--nonsense! I beg your pardon, Judith." Judith kissed him, and finding "Le Vicomte de Bragelonne" face down on the counterpane offered to read to him.

"You would rather talk about Richard," he said. "I know you would. So should I. It's all the damnedest nonsense! Such a charge as that!--Tell you what, Judith. D'ye remember 'Woodstock' and Cromwell in it? Well, Stonewall Jackson's like Cromwell--of course, a better man, and a greater general, and a nobler cause, but still he's like him! Don't you fret! Cromwell had to listen to the truth. He did it, and so will Stonewall Jackson. Such damned stuff and nonsense! It hurts me worse than that old bayonet jab ever could! I'd like to hear what Edward says."

"He says, 'Duck your head and let it go by. The grass'll grow as green to-morrow.'"

"You aren't crying, are you, Judith?--I thought not. You aren't the crying kind. Don't do it. War's the stupidest beast."

"Yes, it is."

"Cousin Margaret's with Richard, isn't she?"

"Not with him--that couldn't be, they said. But she and Miriam have gone to Merry Mount. It's in the lines. I have had a note from her."

"What did she say?--You don't mind, Judith?"

"No, Rob, I don't mind. It was just a verse from a psalm. She said, I had fainted unless I had believed to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.... Be of good courage and He shall strengthen thy heart."

Later, in her room again, she sat by the window through the greater part of the night. The stars were large and soft, the airs faint, the jasmine in the garden below smelled sweet. The hospital day stretched before her; she must sleep so that she could work. She never thought--in that city and time no woman thought--of ceasing from service because of private grief. Moreover, work was her salvation. She would be betimes at the hospital to-morrow, and she would leave it late. She bent once more a long look upon the east, where were the camp-fires of Lee and Stonewall Jackson. In imagination she passed the sentries; she moved among the sleeping brigades. She found one tent, or perhaps it would be instead a rude cabin.... She stretched her arms upon the window-sill, and they and her thick fallen hair were wet at last with her tears.

Three days passed. On the third afternoon she left the hospital early and went to St. Paul's. She chose again the dusk beneath the gallery, and she prayed dumbly, fiercely, "O God.... O God--"

The church was fairly filled. The grey army was now but a little way without the city; it had come back to the seven hills after the seven days. It had come back the hero, the darling. Richmond took the cypress from her doors; put off the purple pall and tragic mask. Last July Richmond was to fall, and this July Richmond was to fall, and lo! she sat secure on her seven hills and her sons did her honour, and for them she would have made herself a waste place. She yet toiled and watched, yet mourned for the dead and hung over the beds of the wounded, and more and more she wondered whence were to appear the next day's yard of cloth and measure of flour. But in these days she overlaid her life with gladness and made her house pleasant for her sons. The service at St. Paul's this afternoon was one of thankfulness; the hymns rang triumphantly. There were many soldiers. Two officers came in together. Judith knew General Lee, but the other?... in a moment she saw that it was General Jackson. Her heart beat to suffocation. She sank down in the gold dusk of her corner. "O God, let him see the truth. O God, let him see the truth--"

Outside, as she went homeward in the red sunset, she paused for a moment to speak to an old free negro who was begging for alms. She gave him something, and when he had shambled on she stood still a moment here at the corner of the street, with her eyes upon the beautiful rosy west. There was a garden wall behind her and a tall crape myrtle. As she stood, with the light upon her face, Maury Stafford rode by. He saw her as she saw him. His brooding face flushed; he made as if to check his horse, but did not so. He lifted his hat high and rode on, out of the town, back to the encamped army. Judith had made no answering motion; she stood with lifted face and unchanged look, the rosy light flooding her, the rosy tree behind her. When he was gone she shivered a little. "It is not Happiness that hates; it is Misery," she thought. "When I was happy I never felt like this. I hate him. He is glad of Richard's peril."

That night she did not sleep at all but sat bowed together in the window, her arms about her knees, her forehead upon them, and her dark hair loose about her. She sat like a sibyl till the dawn, then rose and bathed and dressed, and was at the hospital earliest of all the workers of that day. In the evening again, just at dusk, she reentered the room, and presently again took her seat by the window. The red light of the camp-fires was beginning to show.

There was a knock at the door. Judith rose and opened to a turbaned coloured girl. "Yes, Dilsey?"

"Miss Judith, de gin'ral air downstairs. He say, ax you kin he come up to yo' room?"

"Yes, yes, Dilsey! Tell him to come."

When her father came he found her standing against the wall, her hands, outstretched behind her, resting on it. The last soft bloom of day was upon her; indefinably, with her hands so, the wall behind her and her lifted head, she looked a soldier facing a firing party. "Tell me quickly," she said, "the exact truth."

Warwick Gary closed the door behind him and came toward her. "The court found him guilty, Judith."

As she still stood, the light from without upon her face, he took her in his arms, drew her from the wall and made her sit in the chair by the window, then placed himself beside her, and leaning over took her hands in his strong clasp. "Many a court has found many a man guilty, Judith, whom his own soul cleared."

"That is true," she answered. "Your own judgment has not changed?"

"No, Judith, no."

She lifted his hand and kissed it. "Just a moment, and then you'll tell me--"

They sat still in the soft summer air. The stars were coming out. Off to the east showed the long red light where was the army. Judith's eyes rested here. He saw it, and saw, presently, courage lift into her face. It came steady, with a deathless look. "Now," she said, and loosed her hands.

"It is very bad," he answered slowly. "The evidence was more adverse than I could have dreamed. Only on the last count was there acquittal."

"The last count?--"

"The charge of personal cowardice."

Her eyelids trembled a little. "I am glad," she said, "that they had a gleam of reason."

The other uttered a short laugh, proud and troubled. "Yes. It would not have occurred to me--just that accusation.... Well, he stood cleared of that. But the other charges, Judith, the others--" He rested his hands on his sword hilt and gazed broodingly into the deepening night. "The court could only find as it did. I myself, sitting there, listening to that testimony.... It is inexplicable!"

"Tell me all."

"General Jackson's order was plain. A staff officer carried it to General Winder with perfect correctness. Winder repeated it to the court, and word for word Jackson corroborated it. The same officer, carrying it on from Winder to the 65th came up with a courier belonging to the regiment. To this man, an educated, reliable, trusted soldier, he gave the order."

"He should not have done so?"

"It is easy to say that--to blame because this time there's a snarl to unravel! The thing is done often enough. It should not be done, but it is. Staff service with us is far too irregular. The officer stands to receive a severe reprimand--but there is no reason to believe that he did not give the order to the courier with all the accuracy with which he had already delivered it to Winder. He testified that he did so give it, repeated it word for word to the court. He entrusted it to the courier, taking the precaution to make the latter say it over to him, and then he returned to General Jackson, down the stream, before the bridge they were building. That closed his testimony. He received the censure of the court, but what he did has been done before."

"The courier testified--"

"No. That is the link that drops out. The courier was killed. A Thunder Run man--Steven Dagg--testified that he had been separated from the regiment. Returning to it along the wooded bank of the creek, he arrived just behind the courier. He heard him give the order to the colonel. 'Could he repeat it?' 'Yes.' He did so, and it was, accurately, Jackson's order."

"Richard--what did Richard say?"

"He said the man lied."

"Ah!"

"The courier fell before the first volley from the troops in the woods. He died almost at once, but two men testified as to the only thing he had said. It was, 'We ought never all of us to have crossed. Tell Old Jack I carried the order straight.'"

He rose and with a restless sigh began to pace the little room. "I see a tangle--something not understood--some stumbling-block laid by laws beyond our vision. We cannot even define it, cannot even find its edges. We do not know its nature. Things happen so sometimes in this strange world. I do not think that Richard himself understands how the thing chanced. He testified--"

"Yes, oh, yes--"

"He repeated to the court the order he had received. It was not the order that Jackson had given and that Winder had sent on to him, though it differed in only two points. And neither--and there, Judith, there is a trouble!--neither was it with entire explicitness an order to do that which he did do. He acknowledged that, quite simply. He had found at the time an ambiguity--he had thought of sending again for confirmation to Winder. And then--unfortunate man! something happened to strengthen the interpretation which, when all is said, he preferred to receive, and upon which he acted. Time pressed. He took the risk, if there was a risk, and crossed the stream."

"Father, do you blame him?"

"He blames himself, Judith, somewhat cruelly. But I think it is because, just now, of the agony of memory. He loved his regiment.--No. What sense in blaming where, had there followed success, you would have praised? Then it would have been proper daring; now--I could say that he had been wiser to wait, but I do not know that in his place I should have waited. He was rash, perhaps, but who is there to tell? Had he chosen another interpretation and delayed, and been mistaken, then, too, commination would have fallen. No. I blame him less than he blames himself, Judith. But the fact remains. Even by his own showing there was a doubt. Even accepting his statement of the order he received, he took it upon himself to decide."

"They did not accept his statement--"

"No, Judith. They judged that he had received General Jackson's order and had disobeyed it.--I know--I know! To us it is monstrous. But the court must judge by the evidence--and the verdict was to be expected. It was his sole word, and where his own safety was at stake. 'Had not the dead courier a reputation for reliability, for accuracy?' 'He had, and he would not lay the blame there, besmirching a brave man's name.' 'Where then?' 'He did not know. It was so that he had received the order'--Judith, Judith! I have rarely seen truth so helpless as in this case."

She drew a difficult breath. "No help. And they said--"

"He was pronounced guilty of the first charge. That carried with it the verdict as to the second--the sacrifice of the regiment. There, too--guilty. Only the third there was no sustaining. The loss was fearful, but there were men enough left to clear him from that charge. He struggled with desperation to retrieve his error, if error it were; he escaped death himself as by a miracle, and he brought off a remnant of the command which, in weaker hands, might have been utterly swallowed up. On that count he is clear. But on the others--guilty, and without mitigation."

He came back to the woman by the window. "Judith, I would rather put the sword in my own heart than put it thus in yours. War is a key, child, that unlocks to all dreadful things, to all mistakes, to every sorrow!"

"I want every worst drop of it," she said. "Afterward I'll look for comfort. Do not be afraid for me; I feel as strong as the hills, the air, the sea--anything. What is the sentence?"

"Dismissal from the army."

Judith rose and, with her hands on the window-sill, leaned out into the night. Her gaze went straight to the red light in the eastern sky. There was an effect as though the force, impalpable, real, which was herself, had gone too, flown from the window straight toward that horizon, leaving here but a fair ivory shell. It was but momentary; the chains held and she turned back to the shadowed room. "You have seen him?"

"Yes."

"How--"

"He has much of his mother in him, Judith. Eventually he will, I think, take it that way. But now it is his father that shows. He is very silent--grey and hard and silent."

"Where is he?"

"At present yet under guard. To-morrow it will all be over."

"He will be free, you mean?"

"Yes, he will be free."

She came and put her arm around her father's neck. "Father, you know what I want to do then? To do just as soon as I shall have seen him and made him realize that it is for my happiness. I want to marry him.... Ah, don't look at me so, saying nothing!" She withdrew herself a little, standing with her clasped hands against his breast. "You expected that, did you not? Why, what else.... Father, I am not afraid of you. You will let me do it."

He regarded her with a grave, compassionate face. "No. You need not fear me, Judith. It is hardly father and child with you and me. It is soul and soul, and I trust your soul with its own concerns. Moreover, if it is pain to consider what you would do, the pang would be greater to find you not capable.... Yes, I would let you do it. But I do not think that Richard will."

XXXVIII. CEDAR RUN

The Seven Days brought a sterner temper into this war. The two sides grew to know each other better; each saw how determined was the other, and either foe, to match the other, raised the bronze in himself to iron. The great army, still under McClellan, at Harrison's Landing, became the Army of the Potomac. The great army guarding Richmond under Lee, became the Army of Northern Virginia. President Lincoln called upon the Governors of the Northern States for three hundred thousand men, and offered bounties. President Davis called upon the Governors of the Southern States for conscripts, and obtained no great number, for the mass of the men had volunteered. The world at large looked on, now and henceforth, with an absorbed regard. The struggle promised to be Homeric, memorable. The South was a fortress beleaguered; seven hundred thousand square miles of territory lost and inland as the steppes of Tartary, for all her ports were blocked by Northern men-of-war. Little news from the fortress escaped; the world had a sense of gigantic grey figures moving here and there behind a great battle veil, of a push against the fortress, a push from all sides, with approved battering rams, scaling ladders, hooks, grapples, mines, of blue figures, all known and described in heroic terms by the Northern public prints, a push repelled by the voiceless, printless, dimly-discerned grey figures. Not that the grey, too, were not described to the nations in the prints above. They were. The wonder was that the creatures could fight--even, it appeared, fight to effect. Around and over the wide-flung fortress the battle smoke rolled and eddied. Drums were distantly heard, now rallying, now muffled. A red flag with a blue cross rose and fell and rose again; grey names emerged, floated, wraith-like, over the sea, not to be stopped by blue men-of-war, names and picturesque nicknames, loved of soldiers. It grew to be allowed that there must be courage in the fortress, and a gift of leadership. All was seen confusedly, but with a mounting, mounting interest. The world gaped at the far-borne clang and smoke and roar. Military men in clubs demonstrated to a nicety just how long the fortress might hold out, and just how it must be taken at last. Schoolboys fought over again in the schoolyards the battles with the heathenish names. The Emperor of the French and the King of Prussia and the Queen of Spain and the Queen of England and the Czar and the Sultan and the Pope at Rome asked each morning for the war news, and so did gaunt cotton-spinners staring in mill towns at tall smokeless chimneys.

Early in June Halleck was appointed commander-in-chief of all the armies of the United States. What to do with McClellan, at present summering on the James twenty-five miles below Richmond, came upon the board. McClellan claimed, quite rightly, that here and now, with his army on both sides of the James, he held the key position, and that with sufficient reinforcements he could force the evacuation of Richmond. Only give him reinforcements with which to face Lee's "not less than two hundred thousand!" Recall the Army of the Potomac, and it might be some time before it again saw Richmond! Halleck deliberated. General Pope had come out of the west to take concentrated command of the old forces of Banks, Sigel, Fremont, and McDowell. He had an attitude, had Pope, at the head of his forty thousand men behind the Rappahannock! The armies were too widely separated, McClellan's location notoriously unhealthy. Impossible to furnish reinforcements to the tune asked for, Washington might, at any moment, be in peril. It was understood that Stonewall Jackson had left Richmond on the thirteenth, marching toward Gordonsville.

The James River might be somewhat unhealthy for strangers that summer, and Stonewall Jackson had marched toward Gordonsville. The desire at the moment most at the heart of General Robert Edward Lee was that General McClellan should be recalled. Therefore he guarded Richmond with something less than sixty thousand men, and he made rumours to spread of gunboats building, and he sent Major-General T. J. Jackson northward with twelve thousand men.

In this July month there was an effect of suspense. The fortress was taking muster, telling its strength, soldering its flag to the staff and the staff to the keep. The besiegers were gathering; the world was watching, expectant of the grimmer struggle. There came a roar and clang from the outer walls, from the Mississippi above Vicksburg, from the Georgian coast, from Murfreesboro in Tennessee, from Arkansas, from Morgan's raids in Kentucky. There was fire and sound enough, but the battles that were to tell were looked for on Virginia soil. Hot and still were the July days, hot and still was the air, and charged with a certain sentiment. Thunderbolts were forging; all concerned knew that, and very subtly life and death and the blue sky and the green leaves came freshlier across the senses. Jackson, arriving at Gordonsville the nineteenth of July, found Pope before him with forty-seven thousand men. He asked for reinforcements and Lee, detaching yet another twelve thousand from the army at Richmond, sent him A. P. Hill and the Light Division. Hill arrived on the second of August, splendid fighter, in his hunting shirt, with his red beard! That evening in Jackson's quarters, some one showed him a captured copy of Pope's Orders, numbers 12 and 75. He read, crumpled the papers and tossed them aside, then turned to Jackson sitting sucking a lemon. "Well, general, here's a new candidate for your attention!"

Jackson looked up. "Yes, sir. By God's blessing he shall have it." He sucked on, studying a map of the country between Slaughter Mountain and Manassas which Hotchkiss had made him. In a letter to his wife from Richmond he had spoken of "fever and debility" attending him during his stay in that section of the country. If it were so he had apparently left them in the rear when he came up here. He sat now tranquil as a stone wall, in sight of the mountains, sucking his lemon and studying his maps.

This was the second. On the sixth of August Pope began to cross the Rappahannock. On the afternoon of the seventh the grey army was in motion. All the eighth it was in column, the heat intense, the dust stifling, an entanglement of trains and a misunderstanding of orders on the part of Hill and Ewell resulting in a confused and retarded march. Night fell, hot and breathless. Twenty-three thousand grey soldiers, moving toward Orange Court House, made the dark road vocal with statements as to the reeking heat, the dust, the condition of their shoes and the impertinence of the cavalry. The latter was more irritating than were the flapping soles, the dust in the throat, and the sweat pouring into the eyes. The infantry swore, swerving again and again to one side of the narrow road to let small bodies of horsemen go by. It was dark, the road going through an interminable hot, close wood. Officers and men were liberal in their vituperation. "Thank the Lord, it ain't my arm!"--"Here you fellows--damn you! look where you are going! Trampling innocent bystanders that way!--Why in hell didn't you stay back where you belong?"--"Of course if you've positively got to get to the front and can't find any other road it's our place to give you this one!--Just wait a moment and we'll ask the colonel if we can't lie down. It'll be easier to ride over us that way.--Oh, go to hell!"

The parties passed, the ranks of the infantry straightened out again on the dark road, the column wound on through the hot, midnight wood. More hoof-beats--another party of cavalry to be let by! They passed the infantry in the darkness, pushing the broken line into the ditch and scrub. In the pitchy blackness an impatient command lost at this juncture its temper. The men swore, an officer called out to the horsemen a savage "Halt!" The party pressed on. The officer furious, caught a bridle rein. "Halt, damn you! Stop them, men! Now you cavalry have got to learn a thing or two! One is, that the infantry is the important thing in war! It's the aristocracy, damn you! The other is that we were on this road first anyhow! Now you just turn out into the woods yourself, and the next time I tell you to halt, damn you, halt!"

"This, sir," said a voice, "is General Jackson and his staff."

The officer stammered forth apologies. "It is all right, sir," said the voice in the darkness. "The cavalry must be more careful, but colonel, true aristocrats do not curse and swear."

An hour later the column halted in open country. A pleasant farmhouse with a cool, grassy yard surrounded by an ornamental fence, white paling gleaming in the waved lights, flung wide its doors to Stonewall Jackson. The troops bivouacked around, in field and meadow. A rain came up, a chilly downpour. An aide appeared before the brigade encamped immediately about the farmhouse. "The general says, sir, that the men may take the rail fence over there, but the regimental officers are to see that under no circumstances is the fence about Mrs. Wilson's yard to be touched."

The night passed. Officers had had a hard day; they slept perhaps somewhat soundly, wrapped in their oilcloths, in the chilly rain, by the smallest of sputtering camp-fires. The rain stopped at three o'clock; the August dawn came up gloriously with a cool freshness. Reveille sounded. Stonewall Jackson came from the farmhouse, looked about him and then walked across the grassy yard. A little later five colonels of five regiments found themselves ordered to report to the general commanding the brigade.

"Gentlemen, as you came by did you notice the condition of the ornamental fence about the yard?"

"Not especially, sir."

"I did, sir. One panel is gone. I suppose the men were tempted. It was a confounded cold rain."

The brigadier pursed his lips. "Well, colonel, you heard the order. All of you heard the order. I regret to say, so did I. Dog-gone tiredness and profound slumber are no excuse. You ought--we ought--to have heard them at the palings. General Jackson has ordered you all under arrest."

"Five of us, sir?"

"Five of you. Damn it, sir, six of us!"

The five colonels looked at one another and looked at their brigadier. "What would you advise, sir?"

The brigadier was very red. "I have sent one of my staff to Mrs. Wilson, gentlemen, to enquire the cost of the entire ornamental fence! I'd advise that we pay, and--if we've got any--pay in gold."

By eight o'clock the column was in motion--a fair day and a fair country, with all the harvest fields and the deep wooded hills and the August sky. After the rain the roads were just pleasantly wet; dewdrops hung on the corn blades, blackberries were ripening, ox-eye daisies fringed the banks of red earth. The head of the column, coming to a by-road, found awaiting it there an old, plain country woman in a faded sunbonnet and faded check apron. She had a basket on her arm, and she stepped into the middle of the road before Little Sorrel. "Air this General Jackson?"

Stonewall Jackson checked the horse. The staff and a division general or two stopped likewise. Behind them came on the infantry advance, long and jingling. "Yes, madam, I am General Jackson. What can I do for you?"

The old woman put down her basket and wiped her hands on her apron. "General, my son John air in your company. An' I've brought him some socks an' two shirts an' a chicken, an' a pot of apple butter. An' ef you'll call John I'll be obleeged to you, sir."

A young man in the group of horsemen laughed, but stopped abruptly as Jackson looked round. The latter turned to the old woman with the gentlest blue eyes, and the kindliest slow smile. "I've got a great many companies, ma'am. They are all along the road from Gordonsville. I don't believe I know your son."

But the old woman would not have that. "My lan', general! I reckon you all know John! I reckon John wuz the first man to jine the army. He wuz chopping down the big gum by the crick, an' the news come, an' he chopped on twel the gum wuz down, an' he says, says he, 'I'll cut it up for you, Maw, an' then I'm goin'.' An' he went.--He's about your make an' he has light hair an' eyes an' he wuz wearing butternut--"

"What is his last name, ma'am?"

"His middle name's Henry an' his last name's Simpson."

"In whose brigade is he, and in what regiment?"

But the old woman shook her head. She knew only that he was in General Jackson's company. "We never larned to write, John an' me. He wuz powerful good to me--en I reckon he's been in all the battles 'cause he wuz born that way. Some socks, and two shirts an' something to eat--an' he hez a scar over his eye where a setting hen pecked him when he was little--an' won't you please find him for me, sir?" The old voice quavered toward tears.

Stonewall Jackson dismounted, and looked toward the on-coming column. The advance was now but a few hundred yards away; the whole army to the last wagon train had its orders for expedition. He sent for his adjutant. "Companies from Orange County, sir? Yes, there are a number in different regiments and brigades."

"Well, you will go, colonel, and halt the advance. See if there is an Orange company and a private named John Simpson."

There was not. The woman with the basket was old and tired. She sat down on the earth beneath a sign post and threw her apron over her head. Jackson sent an aide back three miles to the main body. "Captain, find the Orange companies and a private named John Simpson. Bring him here. Tall, light-haired, light eyes, with a scar over one eye. If he is not in the main column go on to the rear."

The aide spurred his horse. Jackson explained matters. "You'll have to wait a while, Mrs. Simpson. If your son's in the army he'll be brought to you. I'll leave one of my aides with you!" He spoke to Little Sorrel and put his hand on the saddle bow. Mrs. Simpson's apron came down. "Please, general, don't you go! Please, sir, you stay! They won't know him like you will! They'll just come back an' say they can't find him!--An' I got to see John--I just got to!--Don't go, please, sir! Ef 't was your mother--"

Stonewall Jackson and his army waited for half an hour while John Simpson was looked for. At the end of that time the cross roads saw him coming, riding behind the aide. Tall and lank, in butternut still, and red as a beet, he slipped from the horse, and saluted the general, then, almost crying, gathered up the checked apron and the sunbonnet and the basket and the old woman. "Maw, Maw! jes' look what you have done! Danged ef you haven't stopped the whole army! Everybody cryin' out 'John Simpson'!"

On went the column through the bright August forenoon. The day grew hot and the dust whirled up, and the cavalry skirmished at intervals with detached blue clouds of horsemen. On the horizon appeared at some distance a conical mountain. "What's that sugar loaf over there?" "That's Slaughter's Mountain south of Culpeper. Cedar Run's beyond."

The day wore on. Slaughter Mountain grew larger. The country between was lovely, green and rolling; despite the heat and the dust and the delay the troops were in spirits. They were going against Major-General John Pope and they liked the job. The old Army of the Valley, now a part of the Army of Northern Virginia, rather admired Shields, had no especial objection to McDowell, and felt a real gratitude toward Mr. Commissary Banks, but it was prepared to fight Pope with a vigour born of detestation. A man of the old Army, marching with Ewell, began to sing:--

"Pope told a flattering tale Which proved to be bravado, About the streams that spout like ale On the Llano Estacado!

"That's the Staked Plains, you know. Awful hot out there! Pretty hot here, too. Look at them lovely roasting ears! Can't touch 'em. Old Jack says so. Pope may live on the country, but we mayn't." "That mountain is getting pretty big." "Hello! Just a cavalry scrimmage--Hello! hello! Artillery's more serious!" "Boys, boys! we've struck Headquarters-in-the-saddle!--What's that awful noise?--Old Jack's coming--Old Jack's coming to the front!--Mercy! didn't know even we could cheer like that!--Yaaaih! Yaaaaaaihhh! Stonewall Jackson! Stonewall Jackson! Yaaaaaaiiiihhh!"

As the day declined the battle swelled in smoke and thunder. The blue batteries were well placed, and against them thundered twenty-six grey rifled guns: two Parrotts of Rockbridge with a gun of Carpenter's appeared at the top of the hill, tore down the long slope and came into battery in an open field, skirted by a wood. Behind was the Stonewall Brigade in column of regiments. The guns were placed en echelon, the horses taken away, the ball opened with canister. Immediately the Federal guns answered, got the range of the grey, and began to do deadly mischief. All around young trees were cut off short. The shells came, thick, black, and screaming. The place proved fatal to officers. Carpenter was struck in the head by a piece of shell--mortally wounded. The chief of artillery, Major Snowden Andrews fell, desperately injured, then Captain Caskie was hurt, then Lieutenant Graham. The gunners worked like mad. The guns thundered, recoiled, thundered again. The blue shells arrived in a deadly stream. All was smoke, whistling limbs of trees, glare and roar. General Winder came up on foot. Standing by a grey Parrott he tried with his field glass to make out the Federal batteries. Lowering the glass he shouted some direction to the men about the gun below him. The noise was hideous, deafening. Seeing that he was not understood he raised his arm and hollowed his hand above his mouth. A shell passed beneath his arm, through his side. He fell stiffly back, mangled and dying.

There was a thick piece of woods, deep and dark, stretching westward. The left of Jackson's division rested here. Ewell's brigades and batteries were on the mountain slope; the Light Division, A. P. Hill in his red battle shirt at its head, not yet up; Jubal Early forming a line of battle in the rolling fields. An aide came to "Old Jube." "General Jackson's compliments to General Early, and he says you will advance on the enemy, and General Winder's troops will support you." Early had a thin, high, drawling voice. "My compliments to General Jackson, and tell him I will do it."

The Stonewall Brigade, drawn up in the rear of the Artillery, stood waiting its orders from Winder. There came a rumor. "The general is killed! General Winder is killed!" The Stonewall chose to be incredulous. "It is not so! We don't believe it."

The 65th, cut to pieces at White Oak Swamp, had renewed itself. Recruits--boys and elderly men--a few melancholy conscripts, a number of transferals from full commands had closed its ranks. The 65th, smaller now, of diluted quality, but even so, dogged and promising well,--the 65th, waiting on the edge of a wheat field, looked across it to Taliaferro's and Campbell's brigades and the dark wood in front. Billy Maydew was sergeant now and Matthew Coffin was first lieutenant of Company A. The two had some talk under a big walnut tree.

"Artillery's been shouting for two hours," said Coffin. "They've got a hell lot of cavalry, too, but if there's any infantry I can't see it."

"There air a message gone to Campbell and Taliaferro. I heard Old Jack send it. 'Look well to your left,' he says, says he. That thar wood's the left," said Billy. "It looks lonesomer than lonesome, but thar! when lonesome things do blaze out they blaze out the worst!"

The colonel of the 65th--Colonel Erskine--came along the front. "It's too true, men. We've lost General Winder. Well, we'll avenge him!--Look! there is Jubal Early advancing!"

Early's line of battle was a beautiful sight. It moved through the fields and up a gentle hillside, and pushed before it bright clusters of Federal cavalry. When the grey lines came to the hilltop the Federal batteries opened fiercely. Early posted Dement and Brown and loudly answered. To the left rolled great wheat fields, the yellow grain standing in shocks. Here gathered the beautiful blue cavalry, many and gallant. Ewell with Trimble's South Carolinians and Harry Hayes's Louisianians held the slope of the mountain, and from these heights bellowed Latimer's guns. Over hill and vale the Light Division was seen coming, ten thousand men in grey led by A. P. Hill.

"It surely air a sight to see," said Billy. "I never even dreamed it, back thar on Thunder Run."

"There the Yankees come!" cried Coffin. "There! a stream of them--up that narrow valley!--Now--now--now Early has touched them!--Damn you, Billy! What's the matter?"

"It's the wood," answered Billy. "Thar's something coming out of the lonesome wood."

On the left the 1st and 42d Virginia were the advance regiments. Out of the forest, startling, unexpected, burst a long blue battle line. Banks, a brave man if not a wise one, interpreted Pope's orders somewhat to suit himself, and attacked without waiting for Sigel or McDowell. In this instance valor seemed likely to prove the better part of discretion. Of the grey generals, Hill was not up, Early was hotly engaged, the artillery fire, grey and blue alike, sweeping the defile before Ewell kept him on the mountain side. Bayonets fixed, bright colours tossing, skirmishers advanced, on with verve and determination came Banks's attack. As it crossed the yellow stubble field Taliaferro and Campbell, startled by the apparition but steady, poured in a withering fire. But the blue came on, swung its right and partly surrounded the 1st Virginia. Amid a hell of shots, bayonet work, shouts, and cries 1st Virginia broke; fell back upon the 42d, that in its turn was overwhelmed. Down came the blue wave on Taliaferro's flank. The wheat field filled with uproar. Taliaferro broke, Campbell broke.

The Stonewall stirred like leaves in autumn. Ronald, colonel of the 2d, commanding in Winder's place, made with despatch a line of battle. The smoke was everywhere, rolling and thick. Out of it came abruptly a voice. "I have always depended upon this brigade. Forward!"

Billy had an impression of wheat stubble beneath his feet, wheat stubble thick strewn with men, silent or lamentably crying out, and about his ears a whistling storm of minies. There was, too, a whirl of grey forms. There was no alignment--regiments were dashed to pieces--everybody was mixed up. It was like an overturned beehive. Then in the swirling smoke, in the swarm and shouting and grey rout, he saw Little Sorrel, and Stonewall Jackson standing in his stirrups. He had drawn his sabre; it flashed above his head like a gleam from the sinking sun. Billy spoke aloud. "I've been with him from the first, and this air the first time I ever saw him do that." As he spoke he caught hold of a fleeing grey soldier. "Stand still and fight! Thar ain't nothing in the rear but damned safety!"

The grey surge hung poised, the tide one moment between ebb and flow. The noise was hellish; sounds of triumph, sounds of panic, of anger, encouragement, appeal, despair, woe and pain, with the callous roar of musketry and the loud indifference of the guns. Above it all the man on the quaint war horse made himself heard. From the blue line of steel above his head, from the eyes below the forage cap, from the bearded lips, from the whole man there poured a magic control. He shouted and his voice mastered the storm. "Rally, brave men! Rally and follow me! I will lead you. Jackson will lead you. Rally! Rally!"

Billy saw the 21st Virginia, what was left of it, swing suddenly around, give the Confederate yell, and dash itself against the blue. Taliaferro rallied, Campbell rallied, the Stonewall itself under Ronald rallied. The first of the Light Division, Branch's North Carolinians came on with a shout, and Thomas's Georgians and Lane and Archer and Pender. Early was up, Ewell sweeping down from the mountain. Jackson came along the restored front. The soldiers greeted him with a shout that tore the welkin. He touched the forage cap. "Give them the bayonet! Give them the bayonet! Forward, and drive them!"

The cavalry with Banks was fine and staunch. At this moment it undertook a charge useless but magnificent. With clarion sound, with tossing colours, with huzzas and waving sabres, a glorious and fearful sight, the cavalry rushed diagonally across the trampled field, its flank exposed to the North Carolinians. These opened a blasting fire while Taliaferro's brigade met it full, and the 13th Virginia, couched behind a grey zigzag of fence, gave volley after volley. Little more than half of those horsemen returned.

Dusk fell and the blue were in full retreat. After them swept the grey--the Light Division, Jubal Early, Ewell, Jackson's own. In the corn fields, in the wheat fields, in the forest thick, thick! lay the dead and wounded, three thousand men, grey and blue, fallen in that fight of an hour and a half. The blue crossed Cedar Run, the grey crossed it after them. The moon, just past the full, rose above the hilltops. On the whole the summer night was light enough. Stonewall Jackson brought up two fresh brigades and with Pegram's battery pressed on by moonlight. That dauntless artillerist, a boy in years, an old wise man in command, found the general on Little Sorrel pounding beside him for some time through the moonlit night. Jackson spoke but once. "Delightful excitement," he said.

XXXIX. THE FIELD OF MANASSAS

The column, after an extraordinary march attended by skirmishes, most wearily winding through a pitch black night, heard the "Halt!" with rejoicing. "Old Jack be thanked! So we ain't turning on our tail and going back through Thoroughfare Gap after all! See anything of Marse Robert?--Go away! he ain't any nearer than White Plains. He and Longstreet won't get through Thoroughfare until to-morrow--Break ranks! Oh Lord, yes! with pleasure."

Under foot there was rough, somewhat rolling ground. In the dark night men dropped down without particularity as to couch or bedchamber. Nature and the time combined to spread for them a long and echoing series of sleeping rooms, carpeted and tapestried according to Nature's whim, vaulted with whistling storm or drift of clouds or pageantry of stars. The troops took the quarters indicated sometimes with, sometimes without remark. To-night there was little speech of any kind before falling into dreamless slumber. "O hell! Hungry as a dog!"--"Me, too!"--"Can't you just see Manassas Junction and Stuart's and Trimble's fellows gorging themselves? Biscuit and cake and pickles and 'desecrated' vegetables and canned peaches and sardines and jam and coffee!--freight cars and wagons and storehouses just filled with jam and coffee and canned peaches and cigars and--" "I wish that fool would hush! I wasn't hungry before!"--"and nice cozy fires, and rashers of bacon broiling, and plenty of coffee, and all around just like daisies in the field, clean new shirts, and drawers and socks, and handkerchiefs and shoes and writing paper and soap."--"Will you go to hell and stop talking as you go?"--"Seems somehow an awful lonely place, boys!--dark and a wind. Hear that whippoorwill? Just twenty thousand men sloshin' round--and Pope may be right over there by the whippoorwill. Jarrow says that with McCall and Heintzelman and Fitz John Porter, there are seventy thousand of them. Well? They've got Headquarters-in-the-saddle and we've got Stonewall Jackson--That's so! that's so! Good-night."

Dawn came calmly up, dawn of the twenty-eighth of August. The ghostly trumpets blew--the grey soldiers stirred and rose. In the sky were yet a star or two and a pale quarter moon. These slowly faded and the faintest coral tinge overspread that far and cold eastern heaven. The men were busied about breakfast, but now this group and presently that suspended operations. "What's there about this place anyhow? It has an awful, familiar look. The stream and the stone bridge and the woods and the hill--the Henry Hill. Good God! it's the field of Manassas!"

The field of Manassas, in the half light, somehow inspired a faint awe, a creeping horror. "God! how young we were that day! It seems so long ago, and yet it comes back. Do you remember how we crashed together at the Stone Bridge? There's the Mathews Hill where we first met Sykes and Ricketts--seen them often since. The Henry Hill--there's the house--Mrs. Henry was killed. Hampton and Cary came along there and Beauregard with his sword out and Old Joe swinging the colours high, restoring the battle!--and Kirby Smith, just in time--just in time, and the yell his column gave! Next day we thought the war was over."--"I didn't."--"Yes, you did! You said, 'Well, boys, we're going back to every day, but by jiminy! we've got something to tell our grandchildren!' The ravine running up there--that was where Bee was killed! Bee! I can see him now. Then we were over there." "Yes, on the hilltop by the pine wood. 'Jackson standing like a stone wall.' Look, the light's touching it. Boys, I could cry, just as easy--"

The August morning strengthened. "Our guns were over there by the charred trees. There's where we charged, there's where we came down on Griffin and Ricketts!--the 33d, the 65th. The 65th made its fight there. Richard Cleave--" "Don't!"--"Well, that's where we came down on Griffin and Ricketts. Manassas! Reckon Old Jack and Marse Robert want a second battle of Manassas?"

The light grew full. "Ewell's over there--A. P. Hill's over there. All together, north of the Warrenton turnpike. Where's Marse Robert and Longstreet?"

Colonel Fauquier Cary, riding by, heard the last remark and answered it. "Marse Robert and Longstreet are marching by the road we've marched before them. To-night, perhaps, we'll be again a united family."

"Colonel, are we going to have a battle?"

"I wasn't at the council, friends, but I can tell you what I think."

"Yes, yes! We think that you think pretty straight--"

"McCall and Heintzelman and Fitz John Porter have joined General Pope."

"Yes. So we hear."

"And others of the Army of the Potomac are on the way."

"Yes, undoubtedly."

"But are not here yet."

"No."

"Well, then, I think that the thing above all others that General Lee wants is an immediate battle."

He rode on. The men to whom he had been speaking looked after him approvingly. "He's a fine piece of steel! Always liked that whole family--Isn't he a cousin of ----? Yes. Wonder what he thinks about that matter! Heigho! Look at the stealing light and the grey shadows! Manassas!"

Cary, riding by Ewell's lines, came upon Maury Stafford lying stretched beneath an oak, studying, too, the old battlefield. The sun was up; the morning cool, fresh, and pure. Dismounting, Cary seated himself beside the other. "You were not in the battle here? On the Peninsula, were you not?"

"Yes, with Magruder. Look at that shaft of light."

"Yes. It strikes the crest of the hill--just where was the Stonewall Brigade."

Silence fell. The two sat, brooding over the scene, each with his own thoughts. "This field will be red again," said Stafford at last.

"No doubt. Yes, red again. I look for heavy fighting."

"I saw you when you came in with A. P. Hill on the second. But we have not spoken together, I think, since Richmond."

"No," said Cary. "Not since Richmond."

"One of your men told me that, coming up, you stopped in Albemarle."

"Yes, I went home for a few hours."

"All at Greenwood are well and--happy?"

"All at Greenwood are well. Southern women are not precisely happy. They are, however, extremely courageous."

"May I ask if Miss Cary is at Greenwood?"

"She remained at her work in Richmond through July. Then the need at the hospital lessening, she went home. Yes, she is at Greenwood."

"Thank you. I am going to ask another question. Answer it or not as you see fit. Does she know that--most unfortunately--it was I who carried that order from General Jackson to General Winder?"

"I do not think that she knows it." He rose. "The bugles are sounding. I must get back to Hill. General Lee will be up, I hope, to-night. Until he comes we are rather in the lion's mouth. Happily John Pope is hardly the desert king." He mounted his horse, and went. Stafford laid himself down beneath the oak, looked sideways a moment at Bull Run and the hills and the woods, then flung his arm upward and across his eyes, and went in mind to Greenwood.

The day passed in a certain still and steely watchfulness. In the August afternoon, Jeb Stuart, feather in hat, around his horse's neck a garland of purple ironweed and yarrow, rode into the lines and spoke for ten minutes with General Jackson, then spurred away to the Warrenton turnpike. Almost immediately Ewell's and Taliaferro's divisions were under arms and moving north.

Near Groveton they struck the force they were going against--King's division of McDowell's corps moving tranquilly toward Centreville. The long blue column--Doubleday, Patrick, Gibbon, and Hatch's brigades--showed its flank. It moved steadily, with jingle and creak of accoutrements, with soldier chat and laughter, with a band playing a quickstep, with the rays of the declining sun bright on gun-stock and bayonet, and with the deep rumble of the accompanying batteries. The head of the column came in the gold light to a farmhouse and an apple orchard. Out of the peace and repose of the scene burst a roar of grey artillery.

The fight was fierce and bloody, and marked by a certain savage picturesqueness. Gibbon and Doubleday somehow deployed and seized a portion of the orchard. The grey held the farmhouse and the larger part of the fair, fruit-bearing slopes. The blue brought their artillery into action. The grey batteries, posted high, threw their shot and shell over the heads of the grey skirmishers into the opposing ranks: Wooding, Poague, and Carpenter did well; and then, thundering through the woods, came John Pelham of Stuart's Horse Artillery, and he, too, did well.

As for the infantry, grey and blue, they were seasoned troops. There was no charging this golden afternoon. They merely stood, blue and grey, one hundred yards apart, in the sunset-flooded apple orchard, and then in a twilight apple orchard, and then in an apple orchard with the stars conceivably shining above the roof of smoke, and directed each against the other a great storm of musketry, round shot, and canister.

It lasted two and a half hours, that tornado, and it never relaxed in intensity. It was a bitter fight, and there was bitter loss. Doubleday and Gibbon suffered fearfully, and Ewell and Taliaferro suffered. Grey and blue, they stood grimly, and the tornado raged. The ghosts of the quiet husbandmen who had planted the orchard, of the lovers who may have walked there, of the children who must have played beneath the trees--these were scared far, far from the old peaceful haunt. It was a bitter fight.

Stafford was beside Ewell when the latter fell, a shell dreadfully shattering his leg. The younger man caught him, drew him quite from poor old Rifle, and with the help of the men about got him behind the slight, slight shelter of one of the little curtsying trees. Old Dick's face twitched, but he could speak. "Of course I've lost that leg! ----! ---- ----! Old Jackson isn't around, is he? Never mind! Occasion must excuse. Go along, gentlemen. Need you all there. Doctors and chaplains and the teamsters, and Dick Ewell will forgather all right ----! ----! Damn you, Maury, I don't want you to stay! What's that that man says? Taliaferro badly wounded ----! ---- ----! Gentlemen, one and all you are ordered back to your posts. I've lost a leg, but I'm not going to lose this battle!"

Night came with each stark battle line engaged in giving and receiving as deadly a bombardment as might well be conceived. The orchard grew a place tawny and red and roaring with sound. And then at nine o'clock the sound dwindled and the light sank. The blue withdrew in good order, taking with them their wounded. The battle was drawn, the grey rested on the field, the loss of both was heavy.

Back of the apple orchard, on the long natural terrace where he had posted his six guns, that tall, blond, very youthful officer whom, a little later, Stuart called "the heroic chivalric Pelham," whom Lee called "the gallant Pelham," of whom Stonewall Jackson said, "Every army should have a Pelham on each flank"--Major John Pelham surveyed the havoc among his men and horses. Then like a good and able leader, he brought matters shipshape, and later announced that the Horse Artillery would stay where it was for the night.

The farmhouse in the orchard had been turned into a field hospital. Thither Pelham's wounded were borne. Of the hurt horses those that might be saved were carefully tended, the others shot. The pickets were placed. Fires were kindled, and from a supply wagon somewhere in the rear scanty rations brought. An embassy went to the farmhouse. "Ma'am, the major--Major Pelham--says kin we please have a few roasting ears?" The embassy returned. "She says, sir, just to help ourselves. Corn, apples--anything we want, and she wishes it were more!"

The six guns gleamed red in the light of the kindled fires. The men sat or lay between them, tasting rest after battle. Below this platform, in the orchard and on the turnpike and in the woods beyond, showed also fires and moving lights. The air was yet smoky, the night close and warm. There were no tents nor roofs of any nature. Officers and men rested in the open beneath the August stars. Pelham had a log beneath a Lombardy poplar, with a wide outlook toward the old field of Manassas. Here he talked with one of his captains. "Too many men lost! I feel it through and through that there is going to be heavy fighting. We'll have to fill up somehow."

"Everybody from this region's in already. We might get some fifteen-year-olds or some sixty-five-year-olds, though, or we might ask the department for conscripts--"

"Don't like the latter material. Prefer the first. Well, we'll think about it to-morrow--It's late, late, Haralson! Good-night."

"Wait," said Haralson. "Here's a man wants to speak to you."

Running up the hillside, from the platform where were the guns to a little line of woods dark against the starlit sky, was a cornfield--between it and the log and the poplar only a little grassy depression. A man had come out of the cornfield. He stood ten feet away--a countryman apparently, poorly dressed.

"Well, who are you?" demanded Pelham, "and how did you get in my lines?"

"I've been," said the man, "tramping it over from the mountains. And when I got into this county I found it chock full of armies. I didn't want to be taken up by the Yankees, and so I've been mostly travelling by night. I was in that wood up there while you all were fighting. I had a good view of the battle. When it was over I said to myself, 'After all they're my folk,' and I came down through the corn. I was lying there between the stalks; I heard you say you needed gunners. I said to myself, 'I might as well join now as later. We've all got to join one way or another, that's clear,' and so I thought, sir, I'd join you--"

"Why haven't you 'joined,' as you call it, before?"

"I've been right sick for a year or more, sir. I got a blow on the head in a saw mill on Briony Creek and it made me just as useless as a bit of pith. The doctor says I am all right now, sir. I got tired of staying on Briony--"

"Do you know anything about guns?"

"I know all about a shotgun. I could learn the other."

"What's your name?"

"Philip Deaderick."

"Well, come into the firelight, Deaderick, so that I can see you."

Deaderick came, showed a powerful figure, and a steady bearded face. "Well," said the Alabamian, "the blow on your head doesn't seem to have put you out of the running! I'll try you, Deaderick."

"I am much obliged to you, sir."

"I haven't any awkward squad into which to put you. You'll have to learn, and learn quickly, by watching the others. Take him and enroll him, Haralson, and turn him over to Dreux and the Howitzer. Now, Deaderick, the Horse Artillery is heaven to a good man who does his duty, and it's hell to the other kind. I advise you to try for heaven. That's all. Good-night."

Day broke over the field of Groveton, over the plains of Manassas. Stonewall Jackson moved in force westward from the old battle-ground. South of Bull Run, between Young's Branch and Stony Ridge, ran an unfinished railroad. It was bordered by woods and rolling fields. There were alternate embankments and deep railroad cuts. Behind was the long ridge and Catharpin Run, in front, sloping gently to the little stream, green fields broken to the north by one deep wood. Stonewall Jackson laid his hand on the railroad with those deep cuts and on the rough and rising ground beyond. In the red dawn there stretched a battle front of nearly two miles. A. P. Hill had the left. Trimble and Lawton of Ewell's had the centre, Jackson's own division the right, Jubal Early and Forno of Ewell's a detached force on this wing. There were forty guns, and they were ranged along the rocky ridge behind the infantry. Jeb Stuart guarded the flanks.

The chill moisture of the morning, the dew-drenched earth, the quiet woods, the rose light in the sky--the troops moving here and there to their assigned positions, exchanged opinions. "Ain't it like the twenty-first of July, 1861?"--"It air and it ain't--mostly ain't!"--"That's true! Hello! they are going to give us the railroad cut! God bless the Manassas Railroad Company! If we'd dug a whole day we couldn't have dug such a ditch as that!"--"Look at the boys behind the embankment! Well, if that isn't the jim-dandiest breastwork! 'N look at the forty guns up there against the sky!"--"Better tear those vines away from the edge. Pretty, aren't they? All the blue morning glories. Regiment's swung off toward Manassas Junction! Now if Longstreet should come up!"--"Maybe he will. Wouldn't it be exciting? Come up with a yell same as Kirby Smith did last year! Wonder where the Yankees are?" "Somewhere in the woods, the whole hell lot of them."--"Some of them aren't a hell lot. Some of them are right fine. Down on the Chickahominy I acquired a real respect for the Army of the Potomac--and a lot of it'll be here to-day. Yes, sir, I like Fitz John Porter and Sykes and Reynolds and a lot of them first rate! They can't help being commanded by The-Man-without-a-Rear. That's Washington's fault, not theirs."--"Yes, sir, Ricketts and Meade and Kearney and a lot of them are all right."--"Good Lord, what a shout! That's either Old Jack or a rabbit."--"It's Old Jack! It's Old Jack! He's coming along the front. Stonewall Jackson! Stonewall Jackson! Stonewall Jackson! He's passed. O God! I wish that Bee and Bartow and all that fell here could see him and us now."--"There's Stuart passing through the fields. What guns are those going up Stony Ridge?--Pelham and the Horse Artillery."--"Listen! Bugles! There they come! There they come! Over the Henry Hill." Attention!

About the middle of the morning the cannonading ceased. "There's a movement this way," said A. P. Hill on the left. "They mean to turn us. They have ploughed this wood with shells, and now they're coming to sow it. All right, men! General Jackson's looking!--and General Lee will be here to-night to tell the story to. I suppose you'd like Marse Robert to say, 'Well done!' All right, then, do well!--I don't think we're any too rich, Garrett, in ammunition. Better go tell General Jackson so."

The men talked, Hill's men and Ewell's men on Hill's right--not volubly, but with slow appreciation. "Reynolds? Like Reynolds all right. Milroy? Don't care for the gentleman. Sigel--Schurz--Schenck--Steinwehr? Nein. Nein! Wonder if they remember Cross Keys?"--"They've got a powerful long line. There isn't but one thing I envy them and that's those beautiful batteries. I don't envy them their good food, and their good, whole clothes or anything but the guns."--"H'm, I don't envy them anything--our batteries are doing all right! We've got a lot of their guns, and to-night we'll have more. Artillery's done fine to-day."--"So it has! so it has!"--"Listen, they're opening again. That's Pelham--now Pegram--now Washington Artillery--now Rockbridge!"--"Yes sir, yes sir! We're all right. We're ready. Music! They always come on with music. Funny! but they've got the bands. What are they playing? Never heard it before. Think it's 'What are the Wild Waves Saying?'"--"I think it's 'When this Cruel War is Over.'"--"Go 'way, you boys weren't in the Valley! We've heard it several times. It's 'Der Wacht am Rhein.'"--"All right, sir! All right. Now!"

Sometime in the middle of the afternoon, after the third great blue charge, Edward Cary, lips blackened from tearing cartridges, lock and barrel of his rifle hot within his hands, his cap shot away, his sleeve torn to ribbons where he had bared and bandaged a flesh wound in the arm, Edward Cary straightened himself and wiped away the sweat and powder grime which blinded him. An officer's voice came out of the murk. "The general asks for volunteers to strip the field of cartridges."

There were four men lying together, killed by the same shell. The head of one was gone, the legs of another; the third was disembowelled, the fourth had his breast crushed in. Their cartridge boxes when opened were found to be half full. Edward emptied them into the haversack he carried and went on to the next. This was a boy of sixteen, not dead yet, moaning like a wounded hound. Edward gave him the little water that was in his canteen, took four cartridges from his box, and crept on. A minie sang by him, struck a yard away, full in the forehead of the dead man toward whom he was making. The dead man had a smile upon his lips; it was as though he mocked the bullet. All the field running back from the railroad cuts and embankment was overstormed by shot and shell, and everywhere from the field rose groans and cries for water. The word "water" never ceased from use. Water!--Water, Water!--Water!--Water! On it went, mournfully, like a wind.--Water!--Water! Edward gathered cartridges steadily. All manner of things were wont to come into his mind. Just now it was a certain field behind Greenwood covered with blackberry bushes--and the hot August sunshine--and he and Easter's Jim gathering blackberries while Mammy watched from beneath a tree. He heard again the little thud of the berries into the bucket. He took the cartridges from two young men--brothers from the resemblance and from the fact that, falling together, one, the younger, had pillowed his head on the other's breast, while the elder's arm was around him. They lay like children in sleep. The next man was elderly, a lonely, rugged-looking person with a face slightly contorted and a great hole in his breast. The next that Edward came to was badly hurt, but not too badly to take an interest. "Cartridges?--yes, five. I'm awful thirsty!--Well, never mind. Maybe it will rain. Who's charging now? Heintzelman, Kearney, and Reno--Got 'em all? You can draw one from my gun, too. I was just loading when I got hit. Well, sorry you got to go! It's mighty lonely lying here."

Edward returned to the front, gave up his haversack, and got another. As he turned to resume the cartridge quest there arose a cry. "Steady, men! steady! Hooker hasn't had enough!" Edward, too, saw the blue wall coming through the woods on the other side of the railroad. He took a musket from a dead man near by and with all the other grey soldiers lay flat in the grass above the cut. Hooker came within range--within close range. The long grey front sprang to its feet and fired, dropped and loaded, rose and fired. A leaden storm visited the wood across the track. The August grass was long and dry. Sparks set it afire. Flames arose and caught the oak scrub. Through it all and through the storm of bullets the blue line burst. It came down on the unfinished track, it crossed, it leaped up the ten-foot bank of earth, it clanged against the grey line atop. The grey gave back, the colours fell and rose; the air rocked, so loud was the din. Stonewall Jackson appeared. "General Hill, order in your second line." Field's Virginians, Thomas's Georgians charged forward. They yelled, all their rifles flashed at once, they drove Hooker down into the cut, across the track, up into the burning brushwood and the smoke-filled woods. But the blue were staunch and seasoned troops; they reformed, they cheered. Hooker brought up a fresh brigade. They charged again. Down from the woods plunged the blue wave, through the fire, down the bank, across and up. Again din and smoke and flame, all invading, monstrous. Jackson's voice rose higher. "General Hill, order in General Pender."

North Carolina was, first and last, a stark fighter. Together with Gregg and Field and Thomas, Pender drove Hooker again down the red escarpment, across the railroad, through the burning brush, into the wood; even drove him out of the wood, took a battery and dashed into the open beyond. Then from the hills the blue artillery opened and from the plains below volleyed fresh infantry. Pender was borne back through the wood, across the railroad, up the red side of the cut.

Hooker had a brigade in column behind a tree-clad hill. Screened from sight it now moved forward, swift and silent, then with suddenness broke from the wood in a splendid charge. With a gleam of bayonets, with a flash of colours, with a loud hurrah, with a staggering volley its regiments plunged into the cut, swarmed up the red side and fell upon A. P. Hill's weakened lines. The grey wavered. Stonewall Jackson's voice was heard again. "General Hill, I have ordered up Forno from the right and a regiment of Lawton's." He jerked his hand into the air. "Here they are. Colonel Forno, give them the bayonet!"

Louisiana and Georgia swept forward, Tennessee, Alabama, and Virginia supporting. They swept Grover's brigade down and back. There was bitter fighting, hand-to-hand, horrible work: the dead lay in the railroad cut thick as fallen leaves. The dead lay thick on either bank and thick in the grass that was afire and thick in the smoky wood. The blue gave way, went back; the grey returned to their lines.

Edward went again for cartridges. He was beside Gregg's South Carolinians when a courier came up. "General Jackson wishes to know each brigade's amount of ammunition," and he heard Gregg's answer, "Tell General Jackson that this brigade has one round to the man, but I'll hold the position with the bayonet." Edward gleaned steadily. "Water! water! water!" cried the field. "O God! water!"

It was growing late, the long, hot day declining. There had been nine hours of fighting. "Nine hours--ninety hours--ninety minutes?" thought Edward. "Time's plastic like everything else. Double it, fold it back on itself, stretch it out, do anything with it--" He took the cartridges from a trunk of a man, crept on to a soldier shot through the hip. The latter clutched him with a blackened hand. "Has Marse Robert come? Has General Lee come?"

"They say he has. Over there on Stuart's Hill, holding Reynolds and McDowell and Fitz John Porter in check."

The man fell back. "Oh, then it is all right. Stonewall Jackson and Robert Edward Lee. It's all right--" He spoke drowsily. "It's all right. I'll go to sleep."

Edward looking sideways toward Stony Ridge saw the forty guns black against the sun. As he looked they blazed and thundered. He turned his eyes. Kearney and Reno, five brigades, were coming at a double across the open. As he looked they broke into the charge. With his bag of cartridges he made for the nearest grey line. The blue came on, a formidable wave indeed. Stonewall Jackson rode along the grey front.

"Men, General Early and two regiments of Lawton's are on their way. You must stand it till they come. If you have only one cartridge, save it until they are up from the cut. Then fire, and use your bayonets. Don't cheer! It makes your hand less steady."

The blue wave plunged into the railroad cut. "I think," said a grey soldier, "that I hear Jubal Early yelling." The blue wave mounted to the level. "Yaaaiih! Yaaaaiih!" came out of the distance. "We know that we do," said the men. "Now, our friend, the enemy, you go back!" Out of the dun cloud and roar came a deep "Steady, men! You've got your bayonets yet. Stand it for five minutes. General Early's coming. This is Manassas--Manassas--Manassas! God is over us! Stand it for five minutes--for three minutes.--General Early, drive them with the bayonet."

Late that night on the banks of Bull Run the general "from the West, where we have always seen the backs of our enemy" sent a remarkable telegram to Halleck at Washington. "We fought a terrific battle here yesterday with the combined forces of the enemy, which lasted with continuous fury from daylight until dark, by which time the enemy was driven from the field which we now occupy. The enemy is still in our front, but badly used up. We lost not less than eight thousand men killed and wounded, but from the appearance of the field the enemy lost two to one. The news has just reached me from the front that the enemy is retreating toward the mountains."

The delusion holding, he, at noon of the thirtieth, ordered a general advance. "The troops to be immediately thrown forward in pursuit of the enemy and to press him vigorously." One of his officers undertook a comment. "By the Lord Harry, it will be the shortest pursuit that even he ever saw! Why, damn it all! they're still here! I tell you the place is unlucky!"

Twenty thousand blue soldiers formed the front that came down from the hills and moved toward the Groveton wood and the railroad track. Behind them were supporting masses, forty thousand strong. On every slope gleamed the great blue guns. The guns opened; they shelled with vehemence the wood, the railroad cut, and embankment, the field immediately beyond. A line of grey pickets was seen to leave the wood and make across the track and into cover. Pope at the Stone House saw these with his field glass. "The last of their rear guard," he said.

One of his generals spoke. "Their guns are undoubtedly yet on that ridge, sir."

"I am perfectly well aware of that, sir. But they will not be there long after our line has crossed the track. Either we will gloriously take them, or they will limber up and scamper after Jackson. He, I take it, is well on his way to Thoroughfare Gap. All that we need is expedition. Crush him, and then when Longstreet is up, crush him."

"And those troops on Stuart Hill?"

"Give you my word they are nothing, general! A rebel regiment, at the most a brigade, thrown out from Jackson's right. I have positive information. Fitz John Porter is mistaken--arrogantly mistaken.--Ah, the rebel guns are going to indulge in a little bravado."

The twenty thousand gleaming bayonets passed the turnpike, passed Dogan's house, moved on toward the wood. It rose torn and thin and black from yesterday's handling. Immediately beyond was the railroad cut. On the other side of the railroad ran a stretch of field and scrub, mounting to Stony Ridge, that rose from the base of the woods. Stony Ridge looked grey itself and formidable, and all about it was the smoke of the forty grey guns. The twenty thousand bayonets pressed on.

There came a blare of bugles. Loud and high they rang--the bugles of the Light Division, of Ewell's, of Jackson's own. They pierced the thunder of the guns, they came from the wood at the base of Stony Ridge. There was a change in the heart-beat below the twenty thousand bayonets. Porter and Ricketts and Hatch stared, and saw start from the wood a downward moving wall. It moved fast; it approached with a certain impetuous steadiness. Behind it were shorter lines, detached masses. Together all came down from Stony Ridge like an avalanche. The avalanche came to and took the field of yesterday, and stood revealed,--Stonewall Jackson holding the railroad cut. "I thought as much," said Fitz John Porter. "Go ask him to give us Reynolds."

After the third charge the 65th and another regiment of the Stonewall Brigade, finding their ammunition exhausted, armed themselves with stones. Those of the Thunder Run men who had not fallen at White Oak Swamp proved themselves expert. Broken rock lay in heaps by the railroad bed. They brought these into the lines, swung and threw them. With stones and bayonets they held the line. Morell and Sykes were great fighters; the grey men recognized worthy foes. The battle grew Titanic. Stonewall Jackson signalled to Lee on the Warrenton turnpike, "Hill hard pressed. Every brigade engaged. Would like more guns."

Lee sent two batteries, and Stephen D. Lee placed them. There arose a terrific noise, and presently a wild yelling. Lee signalled:--

General Jackson. Do you still need reinforcements? Lee.

The signal officer on the knoll behind the Stonewall wigwagged back.

No. The enemy are giving way. Jackson.

They gave way, indeed. The forty guns upon the ridge, the eight that Lee had sent, strewed the green field beyond the Groveton wood with shot and shrapnel. Morell fell back, Hatch fell back; the guns became deadly, mowing down the blue lines. Stonewall Jackson rode along the front.

"General Hill, it is time for the counterstroke. Forward, and drive them!"

The signaller wigwagged to the Warrenton turnpike:--

General Lee. I am driving them. Jackson.

The signaller on the turnpike signalled back:--

General Jackson. General Longstreet is advancing. Look out for and protect his left flank. Lee.

* * * * *

Lee's great battle was over and won. Every division, brigade, regiment, battery, fifty thousand infantry and cavalry brought by the great leader into simultaneous action, the Army of Northern Virginia moved as in a vast parade over plain and hill. Four miles in length, swept the first wave with, in the centre, seven grey waves behind it. It was late. The grey sea moved in the red and purple of a great sunset. From Stony Ridge the forty guns thundered like grey breakers, while the guns of Longstreet galloped toward the front. Horses and men and guns were at the martial height of passion. To the right Jeb Stuart appeared, magnificent. On swept the resistless sea. A master mind sent it over those Manassas hills and plains, here diverting a portion of its waves, here curbing a too rapid onslaught, here harking the great mass forward, surmounting barriers, overwhelming a stubborn opposition, crumbling and breaking to pieces. Wave on wave, rapid, continuous, unremitting, thundered the assault, in the red sunset of the thirtieth of August. Pope's Army fought bravely, but in the dusk it melted away.

XL. A GUNNER OF PELHAM'S

Major John Pelham looked at the clouds boiling up above Bull Run Mountains.

"Rain, rain go away, Come again another day!--"

he said. "What's the house they've burned over there?"

"Chantilly, sir."

Ruined wall and chimney, fallen roof-tree, gaping holes where windows had been, the old mansion stood against the turmoil of the sky. It looked a desolation, a poignant gloom, an unrelieved sorrow. A courier appeared. "The enemy's rearguard is near Ox Hill, sir. They've driven in some of our patrols. The main body is moving steady toward Fairfax Court House. General Jackson has sent the Light Division forward. General Stuart's going, too. He says, 'Come on.'"

The clouds mounted high and dark, thunder began to mutter; by the time a part of the Light Division and a brigade of Ewell's came into touch with Reno and Kearney, the afternoon, already advanced, was of the hue of twilight. Presently there set in a violent storm of thunder and lightning, wind and rain. The trees writhed like wounded soldiers, the rain came level against the face, stinging and blinding, the artillery of the skies out-thundered man's inventions. It grew darker and darker, save for the superb, far-showing lightning flashes. Beneath these the blue and the grey plunged into an engagement at short range.

What with the howling of the storm, the wind that took voices and whirled them high and away, the thunder above and the volleying musketry below, to hear an order was about the most difficult feat imaginable. Stafford gathered, however, that Lawton, commanding since Ewell's wound, was sending him to Jackson with a statement as to affairs on this wing. He went, riding hard against the slanting rain, and found Jackson standing in the middle of the road, a piece of bronze played round by lightning. One of the brigadiers was speaking to him. "The cartridges are soaking wet, sir. I do not know that I can hold my position." Jackson's voice came deep and curt. "Yes, sir, you can. If your muskets won't go off, neither will the enemy's. You are to hold it, whether you can or not. Go and do it."

The brigadier went. Stafford gave his information, and received an order. "Go back along the road until you find the horse artillery. Tell Major Pelham to bring his guns to the knoll yonder with the blasted tree."

Stafford turned his horse and started. The rain and wind were now at his back--a hundred paces, and the road, lonely save for stragglers, the grey troops, the battle in front, was all sheeted and shrouded in the darkly drifting storm. The fitful bursts of musketry were lost beneath the artillery of the clouds. He travelled a mile, found Pelham and gave his order, then stood aside under the tossing pines while the horse artillery went by. It went by in the dusk of the storm, in the long howl of the wind and the dash of the rain, like the iron chariots of Pluto, the horses galloping, the gunners clinging wherever they might place hand or foot, the officers and mounted men spurring alongside. Stafford let them all turn a bend in the road, then followed.

All this stretch of road and field and wood had been skirmished over, Stuart and the blue cavalry having been in touch through the earlier part of the day. The road was level, with the mournful boggy fields, with the wild bending woods. In the fields and in the woods there were dark objects, which might be mounds of turf or huge twisted roots, or which might be dead men and horses. Stafford, riding through wind and rain, had no sooner thought this than he saw, indeed, what seemed a mere hummock beneath a clump of cedars undoubtedly move. He looked as closely as he might for the war of water, air, and fire, and made out a horse outstretched and stark, and a man pinned beneath. The man spoke. "Hello, upon the road there! Come and do a Christian turn!"

Stafford left his horse and, stepping through a quagmire of watery turf, came into the ring of cedars. The man who had called upon him, a tall, long-moustached person in blue, one arm and booted leg painfully caught beneath the dead steed, spoke in a voice curt with suffering. "Grey, aren't you? Don't care. Can't help it. Get this infernal weight off me, won't you?"

The other bent to the task, and at last managed to free the blue soldier. "There! That position must have been no joke! How long--"

The blue cavalryman proceeded to feel bone and flesh, slowly and cautiously to move the imprisoned limbs. He drew a breath of relief. "Nothing broken!--How long? Well, to reckon by one's feeling I should say about a week. Say, however, since about noon. We drove against a party under Stuart. He got the best of us, and poor Caliph got a bullet. I could see the road. Everything grey--grey as the sea."

"Why didn't you call before? Any one would have helped you."

The other continued to rub his arm and leg. "You haven't got a drop of brandy--eh?"

"Yes, I have. I should have thought of that before." He gave the other a small flask. The cavalryman drank. "Ah! in '55, when I was with Walker in Nicaragua, I got pinned like that beneath a falling cottonwood." He gave the flask back. "You are the kind of Samaritan I like to meet. I feel a new man. Thanks awfully."

"It was foolish of you to lie there for hours--"

The other leaned his back against a cedar. "Well, I thought I might hold out, perhaps, until we beat you and I was again in the house of my friends. I don't, however, object to acknowledging that you're hard to beat. Couldn't manage it. Growing cold and faint--head ringing. Waited as long as I could, then called. They say your prisons are very bad."

"They are no worse than yours."

"That may be. Any of them are bad."

"We are a ravaged and blockaded country. It is with some difficulty that we feed and clothe our armies in the field. As for medicines with which to fight disease, you will not let them pass, not for our women and children and sick at home, and not for your own men in prison. And, for all our representations, you will not exchange prisoners. If there is undue suffering, I think you must share the blame."

"Yes, yes, it is all hellish enough!--Well, on one side of the dice, prisoner of war; on the other, death here under poor Caliph. Might escape from prison, no escape from death. By Jove, what a thunderclap! It's Stonewall Jackson pursuing us, eh?"

"Yes. I hear Pelham's guns--You are an Englishman?"

"Yes. Francis Marchmont, at your service; colonel of the Marchmont"--he laughed--"Invincibles."

"I am Maury Stafford, serving on General Ewell's staff.--Yes, that's Pelham."

He straightened himself. "I must be getting back to the front. It is hard to hear for the wind and rain and thunder, but I think the musketry is recommencing." He looked about him. "We came through these woods this morning. Stuart has patrols everywhere, but I think that dip between the hills may be clear. You are pretty pale yet. You had better keep the brandy flask. Are you sure that you can walk?"

"Walk beside you into your lines, you mean?"

"No. I mean try a way out between the hills."

"I am not your prisoner?"

"No."

Marchmont pulled at his moustaches. "Yes. I think I can walk. I won't deprive you of your flask--but if I might have another mouthful--Thank you." He rose stiffly. "If at any time I can serve you, I trust that you will remember my name--Francis Marchmont, colonel Marchmont Invincibles. Send me a slip of paper, a word, anything. Ox Hill will do--and you will find me at your service. Yes, the firing is beginning again--"

Stafford, once more upon the road, travelled northward in an unabated storm. Tree and bush, weed, flower and grass, writhed and shrank beneath the anger of the air; the rain hissed and beat, the lightning glared, the thunder crashed. Between the flashes all was dusk. Before him the rattle of musketry, the booming of the guns grew louder. He saw to the right, on a bare rise of ground, Pelham's guns.

There came an attempted flanking movement of the blue--a dash of cavalry met by Stuart and followed by a movement of two of Hill's brigades. The action barred the road and fields before Stafford. He watched it a moment, then turned aside and mounted the rise of ground to Pelham's guns. A great lightning-flash lit them, ranged above him. All their wet metal gleamed; about them moved the gunners; a man with a lifted sponge staff looked an unearthly figure against the fantastic castles and battlements, the peaks and abysses of the boiling clouds. The light vanished; Stafford came level with the guns in the dusk.

Pelham welcomed him. "'Trust in God and keep your powder dry,' eh, major? It's the kind of storm you read about--Hello! they've brought up another battery--"

Stafford dismounted. One of the guns had the vent so burned and enlarged that it was useless. It rested cold and silent beside its bellowing fellows. Stafford seated himself on the limber, and watched the double storm. It raged above the little hill, with its chain lightnings, with wind, with reverberations of thunder; and it raged below, between some thousands of grey and blue figures, small, small, in the dusk, shadowy manikins sending from metal tubes glow-worm flashes! He sat, with his chin in his hand, pondering the scene.

Pelham came heavily into action. There was a blue battery on the opposite hill. The two spoke in whispers beneath the storm. The gunners, now in darkness, now in the vivid lightning, moved about the guns. Now they bent low, now they stood upright. The officer gestured to them and they to each other. Several were killed or wounded; and as now this section, now that, was more deeply engaged, there was some shifting among the men, occasional changes of place. The dusk increased; it was evident that soon night and the storm would put an end to the battle. Stafford, watching, made out that even now the blue and grey forms in the tossing woods and boggy meadows were showing less and less their glow-worm fires, were beginning to move apart. The guns above them boomed more slowly, with intervals between their speech. The thunder came now, not in ear-splitting cracks but with long rolling peals, with spaces between filled only by the wind and the rain. The human voice might be heard, and the officers shouted, not gestured their orders. The twilight deepened. The men about the gun nearest Stafford looked but shadows, bending, leaning across, rising upright. They talked, however, and the words were now audible. "Yes, if you could handle lightning--take one of them zigzags and turn it loose on blue people!"--"That battery is tired; it's going home! Right tired myself. Reckon we're all tired but Old Jack. He don't never get tired. This is a pretty behaving gun--" "That's so! and she's got good men. They do first-rate."--"That's so! Even the new one's good"--"Good! He learned that gun same as though they grew artillery wherever he came from. Briery Creek--No, Briony Creek--hey, Deaderick?"

"Briony Creek."

Stafford dropped his hand. "Who spoke?"

The question had been breathed, not loudly uttered. No one answered. The gunners continued their movements about the guns, stooping, handling, lifting themselves upright. It was all but night, the lightning less and less violent, revealing little beyond mere shape and action. Stafford sank back. "Storm within and storm without. They breed delusions!"

The blue battery opposite limbered up and went away. The musketry fire in the hollows between the hills grew desultory. A slow crackle of shots would be followed by silence; then might come with fierce energy a sudden volley; silence followed it, too,--or what, by comparison, seemed silence. The thunder rolled more and more distantly, the wind lashed the trees, the rain beat upon the guns. Officers and men of the horse artillery were too tired, too wet, and too busy for much conversation, but still human voices came and went in the lessening blast, in the semi-darkness and the streaming rain.

There was a gunner near Stafford who worked in silence and rested from his work in silence. Stafford became conscious of him during one of the latter periods--a silent man, leaning against his gun. He was not ten feet away, but the twilight was now deep, and he rested indistinct, a shadow against a shadow. Once there came a pale lightning flash, but his arm was raised as if to shield his eyes, and there was seen but a strongly made gunner with a sponge staff. Darkness came again at once. The impression that remained with Stafford was that the gunner's face was turned toward him, that he had, indeed, when the flash came, been regarding him somewhat closely. That was nothing--a man not of the battery, a staff officer sitting on a disabled gun, waiting till he could make his way back to his chief--a moment's curiosity on an artilleryman's part, exhibited in a lull between fighting. Stafford had a certain psychic development. A thinker, he was adventurous in that world; to him, the true world of action. The passion that had seized and bound him had come with the force of an invader, of a barbaric horde, from a world that he ordinarily ignored. It held him helpless, an enslaved spirit, but around it vaguely worked the old habits of mind. Now it interested him--though only to a certain degree--that, in some subtle fashion and for some reason which he could not explain, the gunner with the sponge staff could so make himself felt across space. He wondered a little about this man; and then, insensibly, he began to review the past. He had resolution enough, and he did not always choose to review the past. To-night it was perhaps the atmosphere, the commotion of the elements, the harp of the wind, the scourging rain--at any rate, he reviewed it and fully. When the circle was completed and his attention touched again the storm and the twilight hill near Chantilly, and he lifted his eyes from the soaked and trodden ground, it was to find the double shadow still before him. He felt that the eyes of the gunner with the sponge staff were on him, had been on him for some time. Quite involuntarily he moved, with a sudden gesture, as though he evaded a blow. A sergeant's voice came through the twilight, the wind and the rain. "Deaderick!"

The man by the gun moved, took up the sponge staff that had rested beside him, turned in the darkness and went away.

A little later Stafford left the hilltop. The cannon had ceased their booming, except for here and there a fitful burst; the musketry fire had ceased. Pope's rearguard, Lee's advance, the two drew off and the engagement rested indecisive. Blue and grey, a thousand or two men suffered death or wounding. They lay upon the miry earth, beneath the pelting storm. Among the blue, Kearney and Stevens were killed. Through the darkness that wrapped the scene, Stafford found at last his way to his general. He found him with Stuart, who was reporting to Stonewall Jackson. "They're retreating pretty rapidly, sir. They'll reach Fairfax Court House presently."

"Yes. They won't stop there. We'll bivouac on the field, general."

"And to-morrow, sir?"

"To-morrow, sir, we will follow them out of Virginia."

September the second dawned bright and clear. From Fairfax Court House Pope telegraphed to Halleck. "There is undoubted purpose on the part of the enemy to keep on slowly turning my position so as to come in on the right. The forces under my command are unable to prevent his doing so. Telegraph what to do."

Halleck telegraphed to fall back to the fortifications of Alexandria and Washington.

XLI. THE TOLLGATE

On Thunder Run Mountain faint reds and yellows were beginning to show in the maple leaves, while the gum trees dwelling in the hollows had a deeper tinge of crimson. But the mass of the forest was yet green. The September sun was like balm, amber days, at once alert and dream-like. The September nights were chilly. But the war, that pinched and starved and took away on all hands, left the forest and the wood for fires. On Thunder Run the women cut the wood, and the children gathered dead boughs and pine cones.

The road over the mountain was in a bad condition. It had not been worked for a year. That mattered the less perhaps, that it was now so little travelled. All day and every day Tom Cole sat in the sunshine on the toll gate porch, the box for the toll beside him, and listened for wheels or horses' hoofs. It was an event now when he could hobble out to the gate, take the toll and pass the time of day. He grew querulous over the state of the road. "There'd surely be more travel if 't warn't so bad! Oh, yes, I know there aren't many left hereabouts to travel, and what there are, haven't got the means. But there surely would be more going over the mountain if the road wan't so bad!" He had a touch of fever, and he babbled about the road all night, and how hard it was not to see or talk to anybody! He said that he wished that he had died when he fell out of Nofsinger's hayloft. The first day that he was well enough to be left, Sairy went round to the Thunder Run women, beginning with Christianna Maydew's mother. Several days afterward, Tom hobbling out on the porch was most happily welcomed by the noise of wheels. "Thar now!" said Sairy, "ain't it a real picnic feeling to get back to business?" Tom went out to the gate with the tobacco box. A road wagon, and a sulky and a man on horseback! The old man's eyes glistened. "Mornin', gentlemen!" "Mornin', Mr. Cole! County's mended your road fine! Big hole down there filled up and the bridge that was just a mantrap new floored! The news? Well, Stonewall Jackson's after them!"

But despite the filled-up holes travel was slight, slight! To-day from dawn until eleven, no one had passed. Tom sat in the sun on the porch, and the big yellow cat slept beside him, and the china asters bloomed in the tiny yard. Sairy was drying apples. She had them spread on boards in the sun. Now and then she came from the kitchen to look at them, and with a peach bough to drive the bees away. The close of summer found, as ever, Thunder Run shrunken to something like old age; but even so his murmur was always there like a wind in the trees. This morning there was a fleet of clouds in the September sky. Their shadows drove across the great landscape, the ridges and levels of the earth, out upon which Thunder Run Mountain looked so steadily.

A woman, a neighbour living a mile beyond the schoolhouse, came by. Sairy went over to the little picket fence and the two talked. "How is she?"--"She's dead."--"Sho! You don't say so! Poor thing, poor thing! I reckon I thought of her mor'n I slept last night.--'N the child?"

"Born dead."

Sairy struck her tongue against the roof of her mouth. "Sho! War killin' 'em even thar!"

The mountain woman spoke on in the slow mountain voice. "She had awful dreams. Somebody was fool enough to tell her 'bout how dreadful thirsty wounded folk get, lyin' thar all round the clock an' no one comin'! An' some other fool read her out of an old newspaper 'bout Malvern Hill down thar at Richmond. Mrs. Cole, she thought she was a soldier. An' when she begun to suffer she thought she was wounded. She thought she was all mangled and torn by a cannon ball. Yes'm, it was pitiful. An' she said thar was a high hill. It was five miles high, she said. An' she said thar was water at the top, which was foolish, but she couldn't help that, an' God knows women go through enough to make them foolish! An' she said thar was jest one path, an' thar was two children playing on it, an' she couldn't make them understand. She begged us all night to tell the children thar was a wounded soldier wantin' to get by. An' at dawn she said the water was cold an' died."

The woman went on up Thunder Run Mountain. Sairy turned again the drying apples, then brought her patching out upon the porch and sat down in a low split-bottomed chair opposite Tom. The yellow cat at her feet yawned, stretched, and went back to sleep. The china asters bloomed; the sun drew out the odours of thyme and rue and tansy. Tom read a last week's newspaper. General Lee crosses the Potomac.

Christianna came down the road and unlatched the gate. "Come in, come in, Christianna!" said Tom. "Come in and take a cheer! Letter came yesterday--"

Christianna sat down on the edge of the porch, her back against the pillar. She took off her sunbonnet. "Violetta learned to do a heap of things while I was down t' Richmond. I took a heap of them back, too, but somehow I've got more time than I used to have. Somehow I jest wander round--"

Tom took a tin box from beside the tobacco box. "'T would be awful if the letter didn't come once't every ten days or two weeks! Reckon I'd go plumb crazy, an' so would Sairy--"

Sairy turned the garment she was patching. "Sho! I wouldn't go crazy. What's the use when it's happening all the time? I ain't denying that most of the light would go out of things. Stop imaginin' an' read Christianna what he says about furin' parts."

"After Gaines's Mill it was twelve days," said Tom, "an' the twelfth day we didn't say a word, only Sairy read the Bible. An' now he's well and rejoined at Leesburg."

He cleared his throat. "DEAR AUNT SAIRY AND TOM:--It's fine to get back to the Army! It's an Army that you can love. I do love it. But I love Thunder Run and the School House and Tom and Sairy Cole, too, and sometimes I miss them dreadfully! I rejoined at Leesburg. The 65th--I can't speak of the 65th--you know why. It breaks my heart. But it's reorganized. The boys were glad to see me, and I was glad to see them. Tell Christianna that Billy's all right. He's sergeant now, and he does fine. And Dave's all right, too, and the rest of the Thunder Run men. The War's done a heap for Mathew Coffin. It's made a real man of him. Tom, I wish you could have seen us fording the Potomac. It was like a picture book. All a pretty silver morning, with grey plovers wheeling overhead, and the Maryland shore green and sweet, and the water cool to your waist, and the men laughing and calling and singing 'Maryland, my Maryland!' Fitzhugh Lee was ahead with the cavalry. It was pretty to see the horses go over, and the blessed guns that we know and love, every iron man of them, and all the white covered wagons. Our division crossed last, Old Jack at the head. When we came up from the river into Maryland we turned toward Frederick. The country's much like our own and the people pleasant enough. You know we've got the Maryland Line, and a number besides. They're fine men, a little dashing, but mighty steady, too. They've expressed themselves straight along as positively certain that all Maryland would rise and join us. There's a line of the song, you know:--

"Huzzah! huzzah! She breathes, she burns, she'll come, she'll come, Maryland! my Maryland!"

"She hasn't come yet. The people evidently don't dislike us, and as a matter of course we aren't giving them any reason to. But their farms are all nice and green and well tilled, and we haven't seen a burned house or mill, and the children are going to school, and the stock is all sleek and well fed--and if they haven't seen they've heard of the desolation on our side of the river. They've got a pretty good idea of what War is and they're where more people would be if they had that idea beforehand. They are willing to keep out of it.--So they're respectful, and friendly, and they crowd around to try to get a glimpse of General Lee and General Jackson, but they don't volunteer--not in shoals as the Marylanders said they would! The Maryland Line looks disdain at them. Mathew Coffin is dreadfully fretted about the way we're dressed. He says that's the reason Maryland won't come. But the mess laughs at him. It says that if Virginia doesn't mind, Maryland needn't. I wish you could see us, Aunt Sairy. When I think of how I went away from you and Tom with that trunk full of lovely clean things!--Now we are gaunt and ragged and shoeless and dirty--" Tom stopped to wipe his spectacles.

Sairy threaded a needle. "All that's less lasting than some other things, they air. I reckon they'll leave a brighter streak than a deal of folk who aren't gaunt an' ragged an' shoeless an' dirty."

"I don't ever see them so," said Christianna, in her soft drawling voice. "I see them just like a piece we had in a book of reading pieces at school. It was a hard piece but, I learned it.

"All furnished, all in arms, All plumed like estridges that with the wind Bated--like eagles having lightly bathed, Glittering in golden coats like images."

"No. I reckon if Virginia don't mind, Maryland needn't."

Tom began again. "We've got a lovely camp here, and it's good to lie and rest on the green grass. The Army has had hard fighting and hard marching. Second Manassas was a big battle. It's in the air that we'll have another soon. Don't you worry about me. I'll come out all right. And if I don't, never forget that you did everything in the world for me and that I loved you and thought of you at the very last. Is living getting hard on Thunder Run? I fear so sometimes, for it's getting hard everywhere, and you can't see the end--I wish I had some pay to send you, but we aren't getting any now. This war's going to be fought without food or pay. Tell me, Aunt Sairy, just right honestly how you are getting on. It's getting toward winter. When I say my prayers I pray now that it won't be a hard winter. A lot of us are praying that. It's right pitiful, the men with wives and children at home, and the country growing to look like a desert.--But that's gloomy talk, and if there's one thing more than another we've got to avoid it's being gloomy!--Tell me everything when you write. Write to Winchester--that's our base of supplies and rendezvous now. Tell me about everybody on Thunder Run, but most of all tell me about yourselves. Give my very best regards to Christianna. She surely was good to me in Richmond. I don't know what I would have done without her. At first, before I--"

Sairy put out her hand. "Give it to me, Tom. I'll read the rest. You're tired."

"No, I'm not," said Tom.--"At first, before I came up with the Army, I missed her dreadfully."

Sairy rose, stepped from the porch, and turned the drying apples. Coming back, she touched the girl on the shoulder--very gently. "They're all fools, Christianna. Once I met a woman who did not know her thimble finger. I thought that beat all! But it's hard to match the men."

"You've put me out!" said Tom. "Where was I? Oh--At first, before I came up with the Army, I missed her dreadfully. Billy reminds me of her at times.--It's near roll call, and I must stop. God bless you both. Allan."

Tom folded the letter with trembling hands, laid it carefully atop of the others in the tin box, and took off and wiped his glasses. "Yes, if a letter didn't come every two weeks I'd go plumb crazy! I've got to hear him say 'dear Tom' that often, anyhow--"

Christianna rose, pulling her sunbonnet over her eyes. "Thank you, Mrs. Cole an' Mr. Cole. I thought I'd like to hear. Now I'll be going back up the mountain. Violetta an' Rosalinda are pulling fodder and mother is ploughing for wheat. I do the spinning mostly. You've got lovely china asters, Mrs. Cole. They have a flower they called magnolia down 't Richmond--like a great sweet white cup, an' they had pink crape myrtles. I liked it in Richmond, for all the death an' mourning. Thunder Run's so far away. Good mahnin', Mrs. Cole. Good mahnin', Mr. Cole."

The slight homespun figure disappeared around the bend of the road. Sairy sewed in silence. Tom went back to the newspaper. The yellow cat slept on, the bees buzzed and droned, the sweet mountain air brushed through the trees, a robin sang. Half an hour passed. Tom raised his head. "I hear some one coming!" He reached for the tobacco box.

It proved to be an old well-loved country doctor, on a white horse, with his saddle bags before him. Sairy hurried out, too, to the gate. "Doctor, I want to ask you something about Tom--" "Psha, I'm all right," said Tom. "Won't you get down and set a little, doctor?"

The doctor would and did, and after he had prescribed for the tollgate keeper a two hours' nap every day and not to get too excited over war news, Tom read him Allan's letter, and they got into a hot discussion of the next battle. Sairy turned the drying apples, brushed away the bees, and brought fresh water from the well, then sat down again with her mending. "Doctor, how's the girl at Three Oaks?"

The doctor came back from Maryland to his own county and to the fold which he tended without sleep, without rest, and with little pay save in loving hearts. "Miriam Cleave? She's better, Mrs. Cole, she's better!"

"I'm mighty glad to hear it," said Sairy. "'T ain't a decline, then?"

"No, no! Just shock on shock coming to a delicate child. Her mother will bring her through. And there's a great woman."

"That's so, that's so!" assented Tom cordially. "A great woman."

Sairy nodded, drawing her thread across a bit of beeswax. "For once you are both right. He isn't there now, doctor?"

"No. He wasn't there but a week or two."

"You don't--"

"No, Tom. I don't know where he has gone. They have some land in the far south, down somewhere on the Gulf. He may have gone there."

"I reckon," said Tom, "he couldn't stand it in Virginia. All the earth beginnin' to tremble under marchin' feet and everybody askin', 'Where's the army to-day?' I reckon he couldn't stand it. I couldn't. Allan don't believe he did it, an' I don't believe it either."

"Nor I," said Sairy.

"He came up here," said Tom, "just as quiet an' grave an' simple as you or me. An' he sat there in his lawyer's clothes, with his back to that thar pillar, an' he told Sairy an' me all about Allan. He told us how good he was an' how all the men loved him an' how valuable he was to the service. An' he said that the wound he got at Gaines's Mill wasn't so bad after all as it might have been, and that Allan would soon be rejoining. An' he said that being a scout wasn't as glorious, maybe, but it was just as necessary as being a general. An' that he had always loved Allan an' always would. An' he told us about something Allan did at McDowell and then again at Kernstown--an' Sairy cried an' so did I--"

Sairy folded her work. "I wasn't crying so much for Allan--"

"An' then he asked for a drink of water 'n we talked a little about the crops, 'n he went down the mountain. An' Sairy an' I don't believe he did it."

The doctor drew his hand downward over mouth and white beard. "Well, Mrs. Cole, I don't either. The decisions of courts and judges don't always decide. There's always a chance of an important witness called Truth having been absent. I didn't see Richard Cleave but once while he was at Three Oaks. He looked and acted then just like Richard Cleave,--only older and graver. It was beautiful to see him and his mother together." The doctor rose. "But I reckon it's as Tom says and he couldn't stand it, and has gone where he doesn't hear 'the army--the army--the army'--all day long. Mrs. Cleave hasn't said anything, and I wouldn't ask. The last time I saw her--and I think he had just gone--she looked like a woman a great artist might have met in a dream."

The doctor gazed out over the autumn sea of mountains and up at the pure serene of the heavens, and then at his old, patient white horse with the saddle bags across the saddle. "Mrs. Cole, all you've got to do is to keep Tom from getting excited. I'll be back this way the first of the week and I'll stop again--"

Tom cleared his throat. "I don't know when Sairy an' me can pay you, doctor. I never realized till it came how war stops business. I'd about as well be keeping toll gate in the desert of Sahary."

"I'm not doing it for pay," said the doctor. "It's just the place to stop and rest and talk, and as for giving you a bit of opinion and advice, Lord! I'm not so poor that I can't do that. If you want to give me something in return I certainly could use three pounds of dried apples."

The doctor rode on down the mountain. Tom and Sairy had a frugal dinner. Then the former lay down to take the prescribed nap, and the latter set her washtub on a box in the yard beneath the peach trees. Tom didn't sleep long; he said every time he was about to drop off he thought he heard wheels. He came back to his split-bottomed chair on the porch, the tobacco box for the toll, the tin box with Allan's letters, and the view across the china asters of the road. The afternoon was past its height, but bright yet, with the undersong of the wind and of Thunder Run. The yellow cat had had his dinner, too, and after sauntering around the yard, and observing the robin on the locust tree again curled himself on the porch and slept.

Sairy straightened herself from the washtub. "Somebody's comin' up the road. It's a man!" She came toward the porch, wiping her hands, white and crinkled, upon her apron. "He's a soldier, Tom! Maybe one of the boys air come back--"

Tom rose too, quickly. He staggered and had to catch at the sapling that made the pillar. "Maybe it's--"

"No, no! no, no! Don't you think that, an' have a set-back when you find it ain't! It ain't tall enough for Allan, an' it ain't him anyhow. It couldn't be."

"No, I reckon it couldn't," said Tom. "But anyhow it's one of the boys." He was half way to the gate, Sairy after him, and they were the first to welcome Steve Dagg back to Thunder Run.

Tom Cole forgot that he had no opinion of Steve anyway. Sairy pursed her lips, but a soldier was a soldier. Steve came and sat down on the edge of the porch, beside the china asters, "Gawd! don't Thunder Run sound natural! Yass'm, I walked from Buford's, an' 't was awful hard to do, cause my foot is all sore an' gangrened. I've got a furlough till it gets well. It's awful sore. Gawd! ef Thunder Run had seen what I've seen, an' heard what I've heard, an' done what I've done, an' been through what I've been through--"

Chapter XLII

SPECIAL ORDERS, NO. 191

In Lee's tent, pitched in a grove a mile from Frederick, was held a council of war,--Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Longstreet, Jeb Stuart. Lee sat beside the table, Jackson faced him, sabre across knees, Longstreet had his place a little to one side, and Stuart stood, his shoulder against the tent pole. The last-named had been speaking. He now ended with "I think I may say, sir, that hardly a rabbit has gotten past my pickets. He's a fine fellow, Little Mac is! but he's mighty cautious, and you couldn't exactly call him swift as lightning. He's still a score of miles to the east of us, and he knows mighty little what we are about."

Jackson spoke. "General McClellan does not know if the whole army has crossed or only part of it has crossed. He does not know whether we are going to move against Washington, or move against Baltimore, or invade Pennsylvania. Always mystify, mislead, and deceive the enemy as far as possible."

Longstreet spoke. "Well, by the time he makes those twenty miles the troops should be rested and in condition. We'll have another battle and another victory."

Lee spoke, addressing Stuart. "You have done your work most skilfully, general. It is not every army that has a Jeb Stuart!" He paused, then spoke to all. "McClellan will not be up for several days. Across the river, in Virginia, are yet fourteen thousand of the enemy. I had hoped that, scattered as they are, Washington would withdraw them when it heard of our crossing. It has not done so, however. It is not well to have in our rear that entrenched camp at Harper's Ferry. It is my idea, gentlemen, that it might be possible to repeat the manoeuvre of Second Manassas."

Stonewall Jackson hitched his chair closer. Stuart chuckled joyously. Longstreet looked dubious. "Do you mean, general, that you would again divide the army?"

Lee rested his crossed hands on the table before him. "Gentlemen, did I have the Northern generals' numbers, I, too, might be cautious. Having only Robert E. Lee's numbers, I advance another policy. It is my idea again to divide the army."

"In the enemy's country? We have not fifty-five thousand fighting strength."

"Yes, in the enemy's country. And I know that we have not fifty-five thousand fighting strength. My plan is this, gentlemen. General Stuart has proved his ability to hold all roads and mask all movements. We will form two columns, and behind the screen which his cavalry provides, one column will move north and one column will move south. By advancing toward Hagerstown the first will create the impression that Pennsylvania is to be invaded. Moreover Catoctin and South Mountain are strong defensive positions. The other column will move with expedition. Recrossing the Potomac, it will invest and capture Harper's Ferry. That done, it will return at once into Maryland, rejoining me before McClellan is up."

Longstreet swore. "By God, that is a bold plan!--What if McClellan should learn it?"

"As against that, we must trust in General Stuart. These people must be driven out of Harper's Ferry. All our communications are threatened."

Longstreet was blunt. "Well, sir, I think it is madness. Pray don't send me on any such errand!"

Lee smiled. "General Jackson, what is your opinion?"

Jackson spoke with brevity. "I might prefer, sir, to attack McClellan first and then turn upon Harper's Ferry. But I see no madness in the other plan--if the movement is rapid. Sometimes to be bold is the sanest thing you can do. It is necessary of course that the enemy should be kept in darkness."

"Then, general, you will undertake the reduction of Harper's Ferry?"

"If you order me to do it, sir, I will do it."

"Very good. You will start at dawn. Besides your own you shall have McLaws's and Anderson's divisions. The remainder of the army will leave Frederick an hour or two later. Colonel Chilton will at once issue the order of march." He drew a piece of paper toward him and with a pencil made a memorandum--SPECIAL ORDERS, NO. 191.

The remainder of the ninth of September passed. The tenth of September passed, and the eleventh, mild, balmy and extremely still. The twelfth found the landscape for miles around Frederick still dozing. At noon, however, upon this day things changed. McClellan's strong cavalry advance came into touch with Jeb Stuart a league or two to the east. There ensued a skirmish approaching in dignity to an engagement. Finally the grey drew off, though not, to the Federal surprise, in the direction of Frederick. Instead they galloped north.

The blue advance trotted on, sabre to hand, ready for the dash into Frederick. Pierced at last was the grey, movable screen! Now with the infantry close behind, with the magnificent artillery rumbling up, with McClellan grim from the Seven Days--now for the impact which should wipe out the memory of the defeat of a fortnight ago, of the second Bull Run, an impact that should grind rebellion small! They came to Frederick and found a quiet shell. There was no one there to sabre.

Information abounded. McClellan, riding in with his staff toward evening, found himself in a sandstorm of news, through which nothing could be distinctly observed. Prominent citizens were brought before him. "Yes, general; they undoubtedly went north. Yes, sir, the morning of the tenth. Two columns, but starting one just after the other and on the same road. Yes, sir, some of our younger men did follow on horseback after an hour or two. They could just see the columns still moving north. Then they ran against Stuart's cordon and they had to turn back. Frederick's been just like a desert island--nobody coming and nobody getting away. For all he's as frisky as a puppy, Jeb Stuart's a mighty good watch dog!"

McClellan laughed. "'Beauty' Stuart!--I wish I had him here." He grew grave again. "I am obliged to you, sir. Who's this, Ames?"

"It is a priest, sir, that's much looked up to. He says he has a collection of maps--Father Tierney, will you speak to the general?"

"Faith, and that I will, my son!" said Father Tierney. "Good avenin', general, and the best of fortunes!"

"Good evening, Father. What has your collection to do with it?"

"Faith," said Father Tierney, "and that's for you to judge, general. It was the avenin' of the eighth, and I was sittin' in my parlour after Judy O'Flaherty's funeral, and having just parted with Father Lavalle at the Noviciate. And there came a rap, and an aide of Stonewall Jackson's--But whisht! maybe I am taking up your time, general, with things you already know?"

"Go on, go on! 'An aide of Stonewall Jackson's--'"

"'Holy powers!' thinks I, 'no rest even afther a funeral!' but 'Come in, come in, my son!' I said, and in he comes. 'My name is Jarrow, Father,' says he, 'and General Jackson has heard that you have a foine collection of maps.'

"'And that's thrue enough,' says I, 'and what then, my son?' Whereupon he lays down his sword and cap and says, 'May I look at thim?'"

Father Tierney coughed. "There's a number of gentlemen waiting in the entrry. Maybe, general, you'd be afther learning of the movement of the ribils with more accuracy from thim. And I could finish about the maps another time. You aren't under any obligation to be listenin' to me."

"Shut the door, Ames," said the general. "Now Father.--'May I look at them,' he said."

"'Why, av course,' said I, 'far be it from Benedict Tierney to put a lock on knowledge!' and I got thim down. 'There's one that was made for Leonard Calvert in 1643'--says I, 'and there's another showing St. Mary's about the time of the Indian massacre, and there's a very rare one of the Chesapeake--'

"'Extremely interesting' he says, 'but for General Jackson's purposes 1862 will answer. You have recent maps also?'

"'Yes, I have,' I said, and I got thim down, rather disappointed, having thought him interested in Colonial Maryland and maybe in the location of missions. 'What do you wish?' said I, still polite, though I had lost interest. 'A map of Pennsylvania,' said he--"

"A map of Pennsylvania!--Ames, get your notebook there."

"And I unrolled it and he looked at it hard. 'Good road to Waynesboro?' he said, and says I, 'Fair, my son, fair!' And says he, 'I may take this map to General Jackson?' 'Yes,' said I, 'but I hope you'll soon be so good as to return it.' 'I will,' said he. 'Bedad,' said I, 'you ribils are right good at returning things! I'll say that for you!' said I--and he rolled up the map and put it under his arm."

The general drew a long breath. "Pennsylvania invaded by way of Waynesboro. I am much obliged, Father--"

"Wait, wait, my son, I'm not done, yet! And thin, says he, 'General Jackson wants a map of the country due east from here, one,' says he, 'that shows the roads to Baltimore.'"

"Baltimore!--"

"'Have you got that one?' says he. 'Yis,' says I, and unrolled it, and he looked at it carefully and long. 'I see,' says he, 'that by going north from Frederick to Double Pipe Creek you would strike there the turnpike running east. Thank you, Father! May I take this one, too?' And he rolled it up and put it under his arm--"

"Baltimore," said McClellan, "Baltimore--"

"'And now, Father,' says he, 'have you one of the region between here and Washington?'... Don't be afther apologizing, general! There are times when I want a strong word meself. So I got that map, too, and he looked at it steadily. 'I understand,' says he, 'that going west by north you would strike a road that leads you south again?'--'And that's thrue,' said I. And he looked at the map long and steadily again, and he asked what was the precise distance from Point of Rocks to Washington--"

"Point of Rocks! Good Lord! Ames, get ready to take these telegrams--"

"And thin he said, 'May I have this, too, Father?' and he rolled it up, and said General Jackson would certainly be obliged and would return thim in good order. (Which he did.) And thin he took up his cap and sword and said good avenin' and went. That's all that I know of the matter, general, saving and excepting, that the ribil columns certainly started next morning with their faces toward the great State of Pennsylvania. Don't mention it, general!--though if you are interested in good works, and I'm not doubting the same, there's an orphan asylum here--"

Having arrived at a cross-roads without a signpost McClellan characteristically hesitated. The activity of the next twelve hours was principally electrical and travelled by wire from Frederick to Washington and Washington to Frederick. The cavalry, indeed was pushed forward toward Boonsboro, but for the remainder of the army, as it came up, corps by corps, the night passed in inaction, and morning dawned on inaction. March north toward Pennsylvania, and leave Washington to be bombarded!--turn south and east toward Washington and hear a cry of protest and anger from an invaded state!--turn due east to Baltimore and be awakened by the enemy's cannon thundering against the other sides of the figure!--leave Baltimore out of the calculation and lose, perhaps, the whole of Maryland! McClellan was disturbed enough. And then, in the great drama of real life there occurred an incident.

An aide appeared in the doorway of the room in which were gathered McClellan and several of his generals. The discussion had been a heated one; all the men looked haggard, disturbed. "What is it?" asked McClellan sharply.

The aide held something in his hand. "This has just been found, sir. It seems to have been dropped at a street corner. Leaves and rubbish had been blown over it. The soldier who found it brought it here. He thought it important--and I think it is, sir."

He crossed the floor and gave it to the general. "Three cigars wrapped in a piece of paper! Why, what--A piece of paper wrapped around three cigars. Open the shutters more widely, Ames!"

HEADQUARTERS ARMY OF NORTHERN VIRGINIA,

September 9, 1862.

SPECIAL ORDERS, NO. 191

The army will resume its march to-morrow, taking the Hagerstown road. General Jackson's command will form the advance, and after passing Middletown with such portion as he may select, take the route toward Sharpsburg, cross the Potomac at the most convenient point, and by Friday morning take possession of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, capture such of the enemy as may be at Martinsburg, and intercept such as may attempt to escape from Harper's Ferry.

General Longstreet's command will pursue the main road as far as Boonsborough, where it will halt with reserve, supply, and baggage trains of the army.

General McLaws, with his own division and that of General R. H. Anderson, will follow General Longstreet. On reaching Middletown he will take the route to Harper's Ferry, and by Friday morning possess himself of the Maryland Heights and endeavour to capture the enemy at Harper's Ferry and vicinity.

General Walker with his division, after accomplishing the object in which he is now engaged, will cross the Potomac at Cheek's Ford, ascend its right bank to Lovettesville, take possession of Loudoun Heights, if practicable, by Friday morning, Key's Ford on his left, and the road between the end of the mountain and the Potomac on his right. He will as far as possible cooperate with generals McLaws and Jackson and intercept the retreat of the enemy.

General D. H. Hill's division will form the rearguard of the Army, pursuing the road taken by the main body. The reserve artillery, ordnance and supply trains, etc., will precede General Hill.

General Stuart will detach a squadron of cavalry to accompany the commands of generals Longstreet, Jackson, and McLaws, and, with the main body of the cavalry, will cover the route of the army, bringing up all stragglers that may have been left behind.

The commands of Generals Jackson, McLaws, and Walker, after accomplishing the objects for which they have been detached, will join the main body of the army at Boonsboro or Hagerstown.

By command of General R. E. Lee,

R. H. CHILTON., Assistant Adjutant-General.

In the room at Frederick there was a silence that might have been felt. At last McClellan rose, and stepping softly to the window, leaned his hands upon the sill, and looked out at the bright blue sky. He turned presently. "Gentlemen, the longer I live, the more firmly I believe that old saying, 'Truth is stranger than fiction!'--By the Hagerstown Road--General Hooker, General Reno--"

On the morning of the tenth Stonewall Jackson, leaving Frederick, marched west by the Boonsboro Road. Ahead, Stuart's squadrons stopped all traffic. The peaceful Maryland villages were entered without warning and quitted before the inhabitants recovered from their surprise. Cavalry in the rear swept together all stragglers. The detachment, twenty-five thousand men, almost half of Lee's army, drove, a swift, clean-cut body, between the autumn fields and woods that were beginning to turn. In the fields were farmers ploughing, in the orchards gathering apples. They stopped and stared. "Well, ain't that a sight?--And half of them barefoot!--and their clothes fit for nothing but scarecrows. Well, they ain't robbers. No--and their guns are mighty bright!"

South Mountain was crossed at Turner's Gap. It was near sunset when the bugles rang halt. Brigade by brigade Stonewall Jackson's command left the road, stacked arms, broke ranks in fair, rolling autumn fields and woods. A mile or two ahead was the village of Boonsboro. Jackson sent forward to make enquiries Major Kyd Douglas of his staff. That officer took a cavalryman with him and trotted off.

The little place looked like a Sweet Auburn of the vale, so tranquilly innocent did it lie beneath the rosy west. The two officers commented upon it, and the next moment ran into a Federal cavalry company sent to Sweet Auburn from Hancock for forage or recruits or some such matter. The blue troopers set up a huzzah, and charged. The two in grey turned and dug spur,--past ran the fields, past ran the woods! The thundering pursuit fired its revolvers; the grey turned in saddle and emptied theirs, then bent head to horse's neck and plied the spur. Before them the road mounted. "Pass the hill and we are safe!--Pass the hill and we are safe!" thought the grey, and the spur drew blood. Behind came the blue--a dozen troopers. "Stop there, you damned rebels, stop there! If you don't, when we catch you we'll cut you to pieces!" Almost at the hilltop one of the grey uttered a cry. "Good God! the general!"

Stonewall Jackson was coming toward them. He was walking apparently in deep thought, and leading Little Sorrel. He was quite alone. The two officers shouted. They saw him look up, take in the situation, and put his hand on the saddle bow. Then, to give him time, the two turned. "Yaaiih! Yaaaaiiahh!" they yelled, and charged the enemy.

The blue, taken by surprise, misinterpreted the first shout and the ensuing action. There must, of course, be coming over the hill a grey force detached on some reconnoissance or other from the rebel horde known to be reposing at Frederick. Presumably it would be cavalry--and coming at a gallop! To stop to cut down these two yelling grey devils might be to invite destruction. The blue troopers first emptied their revolvers, then wheeled horse, and retired to Sweet Auburn, out of which a little later the grey cavalry did indeed drive them.

In the last of the rosy light the two officers, now again at the hilltop, saw the camp outspread below it and coming at a double quick the regiment which Jackson had sent to the rescue. One checked his horse. "What's that?" asked the other.

"The general's gloves. He dropped them when he mounted."

He stooped from his horse and gathered them up. Later, back in camp, he went to headquarters. Jackson was talking ammunition with his chief of ordnance, an aide of A. P. Hill's standing near, waiting his turn. "Well, Major Douglas?"

"Your gloves, general. You dropped them on the hilltop."

"Good! put them there, major, if you please.--Colonel Crutchfield, the ordnance train will cross first. As the batteries come up from the river see that every caisson is filled. That is all. Now, Captain Scarborough--"

"General Hill very earnestly asks, sir, that he may be permitted to speak to you."

"Where is General Hill? Is he here?"

"Yes, sir, he is outside the tent."

"Tell him to come in. You have a very good fast horse, Major Douglas. There is nothing more, I think, to-night. Good-night."

A. P. Hill entered alone, without his sword. "Good-evening, General Hill," said Jackson.

Hill stood very straight, his red beard just gleaming a little in the dusky tent. "I am come to prefer a request, sir."

"Yes. What is it?"

"A week ago, upon the crossing of the Potomac, you placed me under arrest for what you conceived--for disobedience to orders. Since then General Branch has commanded the Light Division."

"Yes."

"I feel certain, sir, that battle is imminent. General Branch is a good and brave soldier, but--but--I am come to beg, sir, that I may be released from arrest till the battle is over."

Stonewall Jackson, sitting stiffly, looked at the other standing, tense, energetic, before him. Something stole into his face that without being a smile was like a smile. It gave a strange effect of mildness, tenderness. It was gone almost as soon as it had come, but it had been there. "I can understand your feeling, sir," he said. "A battle is imminent. Until it is over you are restored to your command."

The detachment of the Army of Northern Virginia going against Harper's Ferry crossed the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal at Williamsport and forded the Potomac a few hundred yards below the ferry. A. P. Hill, McLaws, Walker, Jackson's own, the long column overpassed the silver reaches, from the willows and sycamores of the Maryland shore to the tall and dreamy woods against the Virginia sky. "We know this place," said the old Army of the Valley. "Dam No. 5's just above there!" Regiment by regiment, as it dipped into the water, the column broke into song. "Carry me back to Old Virginny!" sang the soldiers.

At Martinsburg were thirty-five hundred blue troops. Stonewall Jackson sent A. P. Hill down by the turnpike; he himself made a detour and came upon the town from the west. The thirty-five hundred blue troops could retire southward, a thing hardly to their liking, or they could hasten eastward and throw themselves into Harper's Ferry. As was anticipated, they chose the latter course.

Stonewall Jackson entered Martinsburg amid acclaim. Here he rested his troops a few hours, then in the afternoon swung eastward and bivouacked upon the Opequon. "At early dawn," he marched again. Ahead rode his cavalry, and they kept the roads on two sides of Harper's Ferry. A dispatch came from General Lafayette McLaws. General Jackson:--After some fighting I have got the Maryland Heights. Loudoun Heights in possession of General Walker. Enemy cut off north and east.

"Good! good!" said Jackson. "North, east, south, and west."

On the Maryland side of the Potomac, some miles to the north of Harper's Ferry, Lee likewise received a report--brought in haste by a courier of Stuart's. General:--The enemy seems to have waked up. McClellan reported moving toward South Mountain with some rapidity. I am holding Crampton and Turner's Gaps. What are my orders?

Lee looked eastward toward South Mountain and southward to Harper's Ferry. "General McClellan can only be guessing. We must gain time for General Jackson at Harper's Ferry." He sent word to Stuart. "D. H. Hill's division returning to South Mountain General Longstreet ordered back from Hagerstown. We must gain time for General Jackson. Hold the gaps."

D. H. Hill and Stuart held them. High above the valleys ran the roads--and all the slopes were boulder-strewn, crested moreover by broken stone walls. Hooker and Reno with the First and Ninth corps attacked Turner's Gap, Franklin's corps attacked Crampton's Gap. High above the country side, bloody and determined, eight thousand against thirty thousand, raged the battle.

Stonewall Jackson, closely investing Harper's Ferry, posting his batteries on both sides of the river, on the Maryland Heights and Loudoun Heights, heard the firing to the northward. He knit his brows. He knew that McClellan had occupied Frederick, but he knew nothing of the copy of an order found wrapped around three cigars. "What do you think of it, general?" ventured one of his brigadiers.

"I think, sir, it may be a cavalry engagement. Pleasanton came into touch with General Stuart and the Horse Artillery."

"It could not be McClellan in force?"

"I think not, sir. Not unless to his other high abilities were added energy and a knowledge of our plans.--Captain Page, this order to General McLaws: General:--You will attack so as to sweep with your artillery the ground occupied by the enemy, take his batteries in reverse, and otherwise operate against him as circumstances may justify. Lieutenant Byrd, this to General Walker: General:--You will take in reverse the battery on the turnpike and sweep with your artillery the ground occupied by the enemy, and silence the batteries on the island of the Shenandoah. Lieutenant Daingerfield, this to General A. P. Hill: General:--You will move along the left bank of the Shenandoah, and thus turn the enemy's flank and enter Harper's Ferry."

This was Sunday. From every hilltop blazed the grey batteries, and down upon the fourteen thousand blue soldiers cooped in Harper's Ferry they sent an iron death. All afternoon they thundered, and the dusk knew no cessation. Harper's Ferry was flame-ringed, there were flames among the stars. The air rocked and rang, the river shivered and hurried by. Deep night came and a half silence. There was a feeling as if the earth were panting for breath. All the air tasted powder.

A. P. Hill, struggling over ground supposed impassable, was in line of battle behind Bolivar Heights. Lawton and Jones were yet further advanced. All the grey guns were ready--at early dawn they opened. Iron death, iron death!--they rained it down on Harper's Ferry and the fourteen thousand in garrison there. They silenced the blue guns. Then the bugles blew loudly, and Hill assaulted. There were lines of breastworks and before them an abattis. The Light Division tore through the latter, struck against the first. From the height behind thundered the grey artillery.

For a day and a night the blue defence had been stubborn. It was over. Out from the eddying smoke, high from the hilltop within the town, there was shaken a white flag. A. P. Hill received the place's surrender, and Stonewall Jackson rode to Bolivar Heights and then into the town. Twelve thousand prisoners, thirteen thousand stands of arms, seventy-three guns, a great prize of stores, horses, and wagons came into his hand with Harper's Ferry.

On the Bolivar turnpike the Federal General White and his staff met the conqueror. The first, general and staff, were handsomely mounted, finely equipped, sparklingly clean and whole. The last was all leaf brown--dust and rain and wear and tear, scarfed and stained huge boots, and shabby forage cap. The surrender was unconditional. Formalities over, there followed some talk, a hint on the side of the grey of generous terms, some expression on the side of the blue of admiration for great fighters, some regret from both for the mortal wound of Miles, the officer in command. Stonewall Jackson rode into the town with the Federal general. The streets were lined with blue soldiers crowding, staring. "That's him, boys! That's Jackson! That's him! Well!"

Later A. P. Hill came to the lower room in a stone house where the general commanding sat writing a dispatch to Lee. Jackson finished the thing in hand, then looked up. "General Hill, the Light Division did well. I move almost at once, but I shall leave you here in command until the prisoners and public property are disposed of. You will use expedition."

"I am not, then, sir, to relinquish the command to General Branch?"

"You are not, sir. Battle will follow battle, and you will lead the Light Division. Be more careful hereafter of my orders."

"I will try, sir."

"Good! good!--What is it, colonel?"

"A courier, sir, from General Lee."

The courier entered, saluted, and gave the dispatch. Jackson read it, then read it aloud, figure, mien, and voice as quiet as if he were repeating some every-day communication.

ON THE MARCH, September 14th.

GENERAL,--I regret to say that McClellan has, in some unaccountable fashion, discovered the division of the army as well as its objectives. We have had hard fighting to-day on South Mountain, D. H. Hill and Longstreet both suffering heavily. The troops fought with great determination and held the passes until dusk. We are now falling back on Sharpsburg. Use all possible speed in joining me there.

LEE.

Stonewall Jackson rose. "General Hill, arrange your matters as rapidly as possible. Sharpsburg on the Antietam. Seventeen miles."