preading away beyond the road to the
steep slopes, and leaving behind it many black dots to darken the
snows. The gates of the South had yielded, and our friends were
through them.

At that sight I forgot all about our danger. I didn't give a cent for
Stumm's shells. I didn't believe he could hit me. The fate which had
mercifully preserved us for the first taste of victory would see us
through to the end.

I remember bundling Blenkiron along the hill to find Sandy. But our
news was anticipated. For down our own side-glen came the same broken
tumult of men. More; for at their backs, far up at the throat of the
pass, I saw horsemen--the horsemen of the pursuit. Old Nicholas had
flung his cavalry in.

Sandy was on his feet, with his lips set and his eye abstracted. If
his face hadn't been burned black by weather it would have been pale as
a dish-clout. A man like him doesn't make up his mind for death and
then be given his life again without being wrenched out of his
bearings. I thought he didn't understand what had happened, so I beat
him on the shoulders.

'Man, d'you see?' I cried. 'The Cossacks! The Cossacks! God! How
they're taking that slope! They're into them now. By heaven, we'll
ride with them! We'll get the gun horses!'

A little knoll prevented Stumm and his men from seeing what was
happening farther up the glen, till the first wave of the rout was on
them. He had gone on bombarding the _castrol_ and its environs while
the world was cracking over his head. The gun team was in the hollow
below the road, and down the hill among the boulders we crawled,
Blenkiron as lame as a duck, and me with a limp left arm.

The poor beasts were straining at their pickets and sniffing the
morning wind, which brought down the thick fumes of the great
bombardment and the indescribable babbling cries of a beaten army.
Before we reached them that maddened horde had swept down on them, men
panting and gasping in their flight, many of them bloody from wounds,
many tottering in the first stages of collapse and death. I saw the
horses seized by a dozen hands, and a desperate fight for their
possession. But as we halted there our eyes were fixed on the battery
on the road above us, for round it was now sweeping the van of the
retreat.

I had never seen a rout before, when strong men come to the end of
their tether and only their broken shadows stumble towards the refuge
they never find. No more had Stumm, p