e in
proportion. _Then_ show him the enemy and send him into
battle--and what is the result? Skedaddle!

"Don't make any mistake; we haven't any cavalry yet. Some day we
will, when our men learn to ride faster than a walk."

"God!" muttered a brigadier-general under his white moustache;
"it's been a bitter pill to swallow--this raid around our entire
army by fifteen hundred of Jeb Stuart's riders and two iron guns!"

The half dozen lancers, lying on their bellies in the grass on the
bank above the road where this discussion took place remained
crimson, mute, paralysed with mortification. Was _that_ what the
army thought of them?

But they had little time for nursing their mortification that
morning; the firing along the river was breaking out in patches
with a viciousness and volume heretofore unheard; and a six-gun
Confederate field battery had joined in, arousing the entire camp
of Claymore's brigade. Louder and louder grew the uproar along the
river; smoke rose and took silvery-edged shape in the sunshine;
bugles were calling to the colours regiments encamped on the right;
a light battery trotted out across a distant meadow, unlimbered and
went smartly into action.

About noon the bugles summoned the 3rd Zouaves. As they were
forming, the camps of the 8th Lancers and the 10th Light Battery
rang with bugle music. Berkley, standing to horse, saw the Zouaves
leaving the hill at a jog-trot, their red legs twinkling; but half
way down the slope they were halted to dress ranks; and the
Lancers, cantering ahead, turned westward and moved off along the
edge of the river swamp toward the piled-up cloud of smoke down
stream.

After them trotted the 10th New York Flying Battery as though on
parade, their guidons standing straight out behind the
red-and-white guidons of the Lancers.

The Zouaves had now reached wet land, where a staff officer met
Colonel Craig and piloted him through a field of brush and wild
grass, and under the parapets of an emplacement for big guns, on
which men were nonchalantly working, to the beginning of a newly
laid road of logs. The noise of musketry and the smoke had become
prodigious. On the logs of the road lay the first big pool of
blood that many of them had ever seen. What it had come from they
could not determine; there was nothing dead or dying there.

The men glanced askance at the swamp where the black shining water
had risen almost level with the edges of the road; but