ond charge on the trenches. They left me there,
because it was every man for himself.

"A ball in my shoulder and another in my leg. And you came drivin' mad
across the field on a big, crazy white horse and slid down beside me
where I lay. You threw me across your saddle and walked that wild
horse back into our lines.

"Do you remember? Dying men got up on their elbows and cheered you. I
lay six weeks in fever, and I never saw you since. Do you remember?"

"I do, now," said the Bishop. "Our troop came back to the Shenandoah,
and I never knew what--"

That terrible, unforgettable day rolled back upon him. He was just a
few months ordained. He had just been appointed chaplain in the Union
army. All unseasoned and unschooled in the ways and business of a
battlefield, he had found himself that day in the sand dunes before
Fort Fisher. Red, reeking carnage rioted all about him. Hail, fumes,
lightning and thunder of battle rolled over him and sickened him. He
saw his own Massachusetts troop hurl itself up against the
Confederate breastworks, crumple up on itself, and fade away back into
the smoke. He lost it, and lost himself in the smoke. He wandered
blindly over the field, now stumbling over a dead man, now speaking to
a living stricken one: Here straightening a torn body and giving
water; there hearing the confession of a Catholic.

Now the smoke cleared, and Curtis' troops came yelling across the flat
land. Once, twice they tried the trenches and were driven back into
the marshes. A captain was shot off the back of a big white horse. The
animal, mad with fright and blood scent, charged down upon him as he
bent over a dying man. He grabbed the bridle and fought the horse.
Before he realised what he was doing, he was in the saddle riding back
and forth across the field. Right up to the trenches the horse carried
him.

Within twenty paces of their guns lay a boy, a thin, long-legged boy
with a long beardless face. He lay there marking the high tide of the
last charge--the farthest of the fallen. The chaplain, tumbling down
somehow from his mount, picked up the writhing boy and bundled him
across the saddle. Then he started walking back looking for his own
lines.

Now here was the boy talking to him across the mists of twenty-five
years. And the boy, the man, was dying. He had picked the boy, Tom
Lansing, up out of the sand where he would have died from fever bloat
or been trampled to death in the succeeding charges.