em.

Long Jim forgot everything now but his rifle and the enemy there in the
thicket. He slid further and further, still drawing himself over the
ground in that terrible semblance of a serpent. Paul, seeing his face, was
frightened. "Jim! Jim!" he cried. "Stop!" But Long Jim slid slowly on. Tom
Ross said something, but it was lost in the whistling of a cannon shot
overhead.

They saw Long Jim stop the next moment, and Paul believed that he heard
him utter a little sigh. Long Jim's limbs contracted and straightened out
again with a jerk. Then he turned slowly over on his side and lay still, a
moment or two, after which he began to writhe violently. At the same time
he clapped his hand to his head and it came back red.

"Sol sometimes says I've a thick skull, an' 'ef so it's a good thing," he
muttered to himself.

He shook his head again and again, as if to clear it, and crept back to
his friends. There he tore off a portion of his deerskin hunting shirt,
tied it tightly around the wound, and went on with his firing.

"Don't be too enthusiastic, Jim," said Henry.

"I won't," replied Long Jim, "I'm cured."

Lower crouched the five, taking advantage of the bushes and little
hillocks, and sending a bullet every time they saw a flitting figure in
the forest in front of them. Behind them they could still hear the roar of
the combat on the river. The crackle of the rifles and the muskets was
steady in their ears, while now and then the note of a cannon boomed above
it, and a solid shot, curving over their heads, whizzed into the
thickets. But they paid little attention to the main battle; it was
merely a chorus, a background, as it were, for their own corner of the
struggle, which absorbed all their energies.

Their fire was so incessant, it was so well aimed, and it stung the allied
army so severely, that an increasing force was steadily concentrating in
front of them. Nor did they escape wholly unhurt. A bullet grazed Henry's
arm and another did the same for Shif'less Sol's shoulder; but neither
paid any attention to his wounds, loading and reloading, facing the enemy
with undiminished zeal and courage.

Its whole aspect was now a phantom battle to them all. The incessant crash
and roaring in their ears, and the smoke and vapor in their nostrils,
heated their brains and made everything look unreal. They were but
phantoms themselves, and the foes who leaped about in the forest were
phantoms, too. Darker and darker th