eat army, that Pope
might have been present with fifty thousand men, sufficient to overwhelm
Jackson. Instead of the odds being more than two to one in their favor,
they had been two to one against them.

It was a sullen army that lay in the woods in the first hour or two of
the night, gasping for breath. These men had boasted that they were
a match for those of Jackson, and they were, if they could only have
traded generals. Dick and his comrades from the west began to share in
the awe that the name of Stonewall Jackson inspired.

"He comes up to his advertisements. There ain't no doubt of it," said
Sergeant Whitley. "I never saw anybody fight better than our men did,
an' that charge of the little troop of cavalry was never beat anywhere
in the world. But here we are licked, and thirty or forty thousand men
of ours not many miles away!"

He spoke the last words with a bitterness that Dick had never heard in
his voice before.

"It's simple," said Warner, who was binding up his little wound with his
own hand. "It's just a question in mathematics. I see now how Stonewall
Jackson won so many triumphs in the Valley of Virginia. Give Jackson,
say, fifteen thousand men. We have fifty thousand, but we divide them
into five armies of ten thousand apiece. Jackson fights them in detail,
which is five battles, of course. His fifteen thousand defeat the ten
thousand every time. Hence Jackson with fifteen thousand men has beaten
our side. It's simple but painful. In time our leaders will learn."

"After we're all killed," said Pennington sadly.

"And the country is ripped apart so that it will take half a century to
put the pieces back together again and put 'em back right," said Dick,
with equal sadness.

"Never mind," said Sergeant Whitley with returning cheerfulness. "Other
countries have survived great wars and so will ours."

Some food was obtained for the exhausted men and they ate it nervously,
paying little attention to the crackling fire of the skirmishers which
was still going on in the darkness along their front. Dick saw the pink
flashes along the edges of the woods and the wheat field, but his mind,
deadened for the time, took no further impressions. Skirmishers were
unpleasant people, anyway. Let them fight down there. It did not matter
what they might do to one another. A minute or two later he was ashamed
of such thoughts.

Colonel Winchester, who had been to see General Banks, returned
presently and told