Now the galloping had quite died away. There was not a sound,--a
slight breeze blew, but there were no leaves to rustle. I put my head
down on the neck of my dead horse. Extreme fatigue was benumbing the
pain of my now swelling arm; perhaps sleep was near, perhaps I was
swooning.

But a sound came that somewhat revived me. Far, low, joyful, it crept
on the air. I sat up, wide awake. The sound, at first faint, died as
the little breeze fell, then grew in the lull, and came ever more
clearly as the wind arose. It was a sound never to be forgotten,--the
sound of the distant cheering of thousands of men.

Then I knew that Bader had galloped into the Union lines, delivered
the despatch, and told a story which had quickly passed through
wakeful brigades.

Bader I never saw again, nor Lieutenant Miller, nor any man with whom
I rode that night. When I came to my senses I was in hospital at City
Point. Thence I went home invalided. No surgeon, no nurse, no soldier
at the hospital could tell me of my regiment, or how or why I was
where I was. All they could tell me was that Richmond was taken, the
army far away in pursuit of Lee, and a rumor flying that the great
commander of the South had surrendered near Appomattox Court House.

"DRAFTED."

Harry Wallbridge, awaking with a sense of some alarming sound,
listened intently in the darkness, seeing overhead the canvas roof
faintly outlined, the darker stretch of its ridge-pole, its two thin
slanting rafters, and the gable ends of the winter hut. He could not
hear the small, fine drizzle from an atmosphere surcharged with water,
nor anything but the drip from canvas to trench, the rustling of hay
bunched beneath his head, the regular breathing of his "buddy,"
Corporal Bader, and the stamping of horses in stables. But when a
soldier in a neighboring tent called indistinguishably in the accents
of nightmare, Bader's breathing quieted, and in the lull Harry fancied
the soaked air weighted faintly with steady picket-firing. A month
with the 53d Pennsylvania Veteran Volunteer Cavalry had not quite
disabused the young recruit of his schoolboy belief that the men of
the Army of the Potomac must live constantly within sound of the
out-posts.

Harry sat up to hearken better, and then concluded that he had
mistaken for musketry the crackle of haystalks under his poncho sheet.
Beneath him the round poles of his bed sagged as he drew up his knees
and gathered about his shoulder