ed signal had been the cause of it. Doubtless some provision had
been made to attack him in flank and rear, but in the unexpected hurry
of the onset it had to be abandoned. He could still save himself, as his
officers knew; but his conviction that he might yet be able to support
his divisional commander by holding his position doggedly, but coolly
awaiting his opportunity, was strong. More than that, it was his
temperament and instinct.

Harrying them in flank and rear, contesting the ground inch by inch,
and holding his own against the artillery sent to dislodge him, or the
outriding cavalry that, circling round, swept through his open ranks, he
saw his files melt away beside this steady current without flinching.

CHAPTER VI.

Yet all along the fateful ridge--now obscured and confused with
thin crossing smoke-drifts from file-firing, like partly rubbed-out
slate-pencil marks; or else, when cleared of those drifts, presenting
only an indistinguishable map of zigzag lines of straggling wagons and
horses, unintelligible to any eye but his--the singular magnetism of the
chief was felt everywhere: whether it was shown in the quick closing
in of resistance to some sharper onset of the enemy or the more dogged
stand of inaction under fire, his power was always dominant. A word
or two of comprehensive direction sent through an aide-de-camp, or the
sudden relief of his dark, watchful, composed face uplifted above a
line of bayonets, never failed in their magic. Like all born leaders,
he seemed in these emergencies to hold a charmed life--infecting his
followers with a like disbelief in death; men dropped to right and left
of him with serene assurance in their ghastly faces or a cry of life and
confidence in their last gasp. Stragglers fell in and closed up
under his passing glance; a hopeless, inextricable wrangle around an
overturned caisson, at a turn of the road, resolved itself into an
orderly, quiet, deliberate clearing away of the impediment before the
significant waiting of that dark, silent horseman.

Yet under this imperturbable mask he was keenly conscious of everything;
in that apparent concentration there was a sharpening of all his senses
and his impressibility: he saw the first trace of doubt or alarm in the
face of a subaltern to whom he was giving an order; the first touch of
sluggishness in a re-forming line; the more significant clumsiness of
a living evolution that he knew was clogged by the dea