ts. Horses all right?"

"Yes, sir."

Without-undressing he fell on his camp-bed and, towards dusk thinking
with grim humour of his wife and the Penhallow guns, fell asleep. About
four in the morning the mad clamour of battle awakened him. He got up and
went out of the tent. The night air was hot and oppressive. Far to our
right there was the rattle of musketry and the occasional upward flare of
cannon flashes against low-lying clouds. From the farthest side of the
Taneytown road at the rear he heard the rattle of ambulances arriving
from the field of fight to leave the wounded in tent hospitals. They came
slowly, marked by their flickering lanterns, and were away again more
swiftly. He gave some vague thought to the wounded and to the surgeons,
for whom the night was as the day. At sunrise he went up past the already
busy headquarters and came to the bush-hidden lines, where six thousand
men of the Second Corps along a half mile of the irregular far-stretched
Crest were up and busy. Fires were lighted, coffee boiled and biscuits
munched. An air of confidence and gaiety among the men pleased him as he
paused to give a sergeant a pipe light and divided his tobacco among a
thankful group of ragged soldiers. All was quiet. An outpost skirmish on
the right, as a man said, "was petering out." He paused here and there to
talk to the men, and was interested to hear them discussing with
intelligence the advantage of our short line. Now and then the guns far
to left or right quarrelled, but at eleven in the morning this third of
July all was quiet except the murmurous noise of thousands of men who
talked or lay at rest in the bushes or contrived a refuge from the sun
under shelter of a canvas hung on ramrods.

Generals Gibbon and Webb, coming near, promised him a late breakfast,
and he went with them to the little peach orchard near the headquarters
on the Taneytown road. They sat down on mess-chests or cracker-boxes,
and to Penhallow's amusement Josiah appeared with John, the servant
of Gibbon, for Josiah was, as he said, on easy terms with every black
servant in the line. Presently Hancock rode up with Meade. Generals
Newton and Pleasanton also appeared, and with their aides joined them.
These men were officially Penhallow's superiors, and although Hancock
and Gibbon were his friends, he made no effort to take part in the
discussion in regard to what the passing day would bring. He had his
own opinion, but no one asked for it