. Some had said that Jackson was not
there, that it was merely a detachment guarding the woods, but now they
knew their mistake.

Harry and Dalton stayed close to their general. Shells and shot from
the batteries below on the plain were crashing along the trees, but,
like those from the great guns on Stafford Heights, they passed mostly
over their heads. The two youths at that moment had little to do but
watch the battle. The Southern riflemen crept forward in the woods,
and now their bullets in sheets were crashing into the hostile ranks.
The Union division commander hurried up reinforcements, and the
Pennsylvanians, despite their frightful losses and shattered ranks,
still held fast. But the Southern batteries never ceased for a moment
to pour upon them a storm of death. With red battle before him and the
fever in his blood running high, Harry now forgot all about wounds and
death. He had eye and thought only for the tremendous panorama passing
before him, where everything was clear and visible, as if it were an
act in some old Roman circus, magnified manifold.

Then came a message from Jackson to hurry to the left with an order for
a brigadier who lay next to Longstreet. As he ran through the trees,
he heard now the roar of the battle in the center, where the stalwart
Longstreet was holding Marye's Hill and the adjacent heights. A mighty
Union division was attacking there, and out of the south from the embers
of Fredericksburg came another great division in column after column.

Harry heard the fire of Jackson slackening behind him, and he knew it
was because Meade had been stopped or was retreating, and he stayed a
little with the brigadier to see how Longstreet received the enemy.
The hill and all the ridges about it seemed to be in one red blaze,
and every few minutes the triumphant rebel yell, something like the
Indian war-whoop, but poured from thirty thousand throats, swelled above
the roar of the cannon and the crash of the rifles and made Harry's
pulses beat so hard that he felt absolute physical pain.

He hurried to Jackson, where the battle, which had died for a little
space, was swelling again. As the Pennsylvanians were compelled to draw
back, leaving the ground covered with their dead, the Union batteries
on Stafford Heights reopened, firing again over the heads of the men in
blue. The Southern batteries, weaker and less numerous, replied with
all their energy. A far-flung shot from their