shing back to camp before an awful wave of
men that had rolled out of the cedars on the other side of the cotton
field.

A hundred boisterous drums were now making the thickets ring with
the "long roll." Rachel saw the men in front of her leave their
coffee-making, rush to the musket stacks and take their places in line.
In another minute they were ordered forward to the fence in front of
them, upon which they rested their muskets. Rachel rode through their
line and turned around to look. The broad cotton field was covered with
solid masses of Rebels, rushing forward with their peculiar fierce yell.

"Fire!" shouted the Colonel in front of her. The six field-pieces to her
right split her ears with their crash. A thousand muskets blazed out a
fire that withered the first line of the advancing foe. Another crash,
and the Rebels had answered with musketry and artillery, that tore the
cedars around her, sent the fence rails flying into the air, and covered
the ground with blue-coats. Her faithful mare shied, caught her hoof in
a crack in the limestone, and fell with a broken leg.

So began that terrible Wednesday, December 31, 1862.

Bragg's plan of battle was very simple. Rosencrans had stretched out a
long thin wing through the cedars to the right of the pike. At the pike
it was very strong, but two miles away it degenerated into scattered
regiments, unskilfully disposed. Bragg threw against these three or four
to one, with all the fury of the Southern soldier in the onset. The line
was crumbled, and before noon crushed back to the pike.

Rachel disengaged herself from her fallen steed, and leaning against a
sapling, watched the awful collision. She forgot the great danger in
the fascination of the terrible spectacle. She thought she had seen men
scale the whole gamut of passion, but their wildest excesses were tame
and frothy beside this ecstacy of rage in the fury of battle. The
rustic Southerners whom she had seen at ball-play, the simple-hearted
Northerners whom she had alarmed at their coffee-making, were now
transformed into furies mad with the delirium of slaughter, and heedless
of their own lives in the frenzy of taking those of others.

"You had better run back, young woman," said some one touching her
elbow. "The whole line's going to fall back. We're flanked."

A disorderly stream of men, fragments of the shattered right, caught her
in its rush, and she was borne back to the open fields lying along the
p