for a fresh
attack, and they could hear the sounds made by the enemy cutting down
timber and fortifying.

It was now nearly nine o'clock at night, and save for the fires that
burned here and there and the flash of the picket firing, the night that
hung over the Wilderness was dark and heavy.

Harry passed once more near the Invincibles, who were lying down,
panting with weariness, but exultant. They had lost a third of their
numbers in the attack, but the wounds of his own friends were not
serious.

"Do you know whether we charge them again, Harry?" asked Colonel Talbot.

"I don't know, sir; but you know General Jackson."

"Then it probably means that we attack. Keep down, Captain Bertrand!
Those Northern pickets in the bushes in front of us are active, and,
upon my word, they know how to shoot, as the honorable wounds of many
of us attest!"

Bertrand, eager to see the enemy, was standing on a hillock, and he did
not seem to hear the words of his chief. A rifle cracked in the bushes
and he fell back without a word. The arms of St. Clair received him and
eased him gently to the earth. But Harry saw at a glance that the man
and his fevered ambitions were gone forever. He was dead before he
touched the ground.

"I'm glad that I was the one to catch his body," said St. Clair simply.

Harry was moved at the fall of this man, although he had never really
liked him, but he went on and rejoined his general. Colonel Talbot was
right. Jackson was still intent upon pressing the attack. Night and
darkness were now nothing to him. He meant to achieve Hooker's ruin.

Harry always believed afterward that he felt the shadow of the great
tragedy soon to come. The roar of the cannon had died down, but from
every direction came the firing of scattered riflemen, skirmishers and
pickets. They buzzed like angry bees, and no man on the front of either
army was safe from their sting. But all through the Wilderness along
the line of Jackson's charge the dead and wounded lay. Here and there
clumps of fallen and dead wood of the winter before, set on fire by the
shells, were burning slowly. The smoke from so much firing drifted in
vast banks of vapor through the forest. The air was filled with bitter
odors.

Harry felt a sensation of awe and terror, not terror inspired by man,
but of the unknown or uncontrolled forces that drive men to meet one
another in such deadly combat. Now night did not suffice to stop the
tit