idge. The grey brigades lit their small camp-fires, gathered up the
wounded, grey and blue, dug trenches for the dead, found food where they
might and went hungry where there was none, answered to roll call and
listened to the silence after many names, then lay down in field and
wood beneath the gathering clouds.

Some time between sunset and the first star Steve Dagg found himself, he
hardly knew how, crouching in a line of pawpaw bushes bordering a
shallow ravine. The clay upon his shirt and trousers made it seem
probable that he had rolled down the embankment from the railroad gun to
the level below. That he was out of breath, panting in hard painful
gasps, might indicate that he had run like a hare across the field. He
could not remember; anyhow here he was, a little out of hell, just
fringing it as it were. Lying close to earth, between the smooth pawpaw
stems, the large leaves making a night-time for him, Steve felt deadly
sick. "O Gawd! why'd I volunteer in, seein' I can't volunteer out?"
Behind him he heard the roaring of the guns, the singing of the minies.
A chance shell went over his head, dug itself into the soil at the
bottom of the ravine, and exploded. The earth came pattering upon the
pawpaw leaves. Steve curled up like a hedgehog. "O Gawd! I ain't got a
friend in the world. Why didn't I stay on Thunder Run and marry Lucinda
Heard?"

At dark the guns ceased. In the silence his nausea lessened and the
chill sweat dried upon him. He lay quiet for awhile, and then he parted
the pawpaw bushes and crept out. He looked over his shoulder at the
field of battle. "I ain't going that-a-way and meet that gunner
again--damn him to everlasting hell!" He looked across the ravine toward
the west, but a vision came to him of the hospital in the wood, and of
how the naked dead men and the severed legs and arms might stir at
night. He shivered and grew sick again. Southward? There was a glare
upon all that horizon and a sound of distant explosions. The Yankees
were sweeping through the woods that way, and they might kill him on
sight without waiting for him to explain. A grey army was also over
there,--Lee and Longstreet and A. P. Hill. He was as afraid of the grey
as of the blue; after the railroad gun he was afraid of a shadow.
Finally, he turned northward toward the Chickahominy again.

The night, so dark and hot, presently became darker by reason of masses
of clouds rising swiftly from the horizon and blotting out t