om man to man. He took back
his sabre and pistols and thrust them into his belt, then stooped,
struck a slow match, and laid it to the end of the saucisson, whose
mouth he had fastened to the barrels on the bridge, and rapidly as the
lightning, flung himself across the horse held for him, and fell into
line at the head of the troop.

There was a moment of intense silence while the fire crept up the long
stick of the match; then the shrill, hissing, snake-like sound, that
none who have once heard ever forget, rushed through the quiet of the
night, and with a roar that startled all the sleeping echoes of the
hills, the explosion followed; the columns of flame shooting upward to
the starlit sky, and casting their crimson lurid light on the black
brawling waters, on the rugged towering rocks, on the gnarled trunks of
the lofty pines, and on the wild, picturesque forms and the bold,
swarthy, Spanish-like faces of the Confederate raiders. With a shock
that shook the earth till it rocked and trembled under them, the pillar
of smoke and fire towered aloft in the hush of the midnight, blasting
and hurling upward, in thunder that pealed back from rock to rock,
lifeless bodies, mangled limbs, smouldering timbers, loosened stones,
dead men flung heavenward like leaves whirled by the wind, and iron torn
up and bent like saplings in a storm, as the mass of the barricades
quivered, oscillated, and fell with a mighty crash, while the night was
red with the hot glare of the flame, and filled with the deafening din.

The Federals, sleeping under cover of their intrenchments, woke by that
concussion as though heaven and earth were meeting, poured out from pit
and trench, from salient and parallel, to see their fortifications and
their guard blown up, while the skies were lurid with the glow of the
burning barricades, and the ravine was filled with the yellow mist of
the dense and rolling smoke. Confused, startled, demoralized, they ran
together like sheep, vainly rallied by their officers, some few hundred
opening an aimless desultory fire from behind their works, the rest
rushing hither and thither, in that inextricable intricacy, and nameless
panic, which doom the best regiments that were ever under arms, when
once they seize them.

"Charge!" shouted the Confederate leader, his voice ringing out clear
and sonorous above the infernal tempest of hissing, roaring, shrieking,
booming sound.

With that resistless impetus with which they