advance. Their regiments were coming now
across the shorn cornfield. Dick saw the galloping horses drawing their
batteries up closer and around the flanks. And the rebel yell of victory
which he had heard too often was now swelling from thousands of throats,
as the fierce sons of the South rushed upon their foe.

But the North refused to abandon the battle here. These were splendid
troops, so tenacious and so much bent upon victory that they scarcely
needed leaders. Sedgwick, another of their gallant generals, fell and
was carried off the field, wounded severely. Richardson, yet another,
was killed a little later, but heavy reinforcements arrived, and the
Southerners were driven back in their turn.

These were picked troops who met here, veterans almost all of them, and
neither would yield. The superior weight and range of the Northern guns
gave them an advantage in artillery, and it was used to the utmost. Dick
did not see how men could live under such a horrible fire, but there
were the gray lines replying, and wherever they yielded, yielding but
little.

Noon came and then one o'clock. They had been fighting since dawn, and
a combat so impetuous and terrible could not be maintained forever,
particularly when the awful demon of war was eating up men so fast. Many
of the regiments on either side had lost more than half their number and
would lose more. They were human beings, and even the unwounded began to
collapse from mere physical exhaustion. Some dropped to the ground from
sheer inability to stand, and as they lay there, they heard to the south
and west the rolling thunder that told of Burnside's belated advance
upon the Antietam.

Down where Lee stood watching, the battle blazed up with extraordinary
rapidity. The men who had been held in leash so long by McClellan were
anxious to get at the foe. Burnside's brigades charged directly for one
of the stone bridges, and Lee, watching from his bowlder, hurried the
Southern troops forward to meet them. Again the Northern artillery
proved its worth. The great batteries sent a hurricane of death over the
heads of the men in blue and toward the town of Sharpsburg. Despite all
the valor of the Southern veterans, the heavy masses of the Union men
forced their way across the bridge to the peninsula. Lee's batteries and
infantry regiments could not hold them.

It seemed now that Lee's own force was to be destroyed and that
victory was won, but fortune had in store yet an