At Gaines's Mill he had won emphatic praise for a cool and
daring ride across the battlefield, and for the quick rallying and
leading into action of a command whose officers were all down. With
Ewell at Dispatch Station, he had volunteered for duty at the crossing
of the Chickahominy, and in a hand-to-hand fight with a retiring Federal
regiment he and his detachment had acquitted themselves supremely well.
As far as this warfare went, he had reason to be satisfied. But he was
not so, and as he rode he thought the morning scene of a twilight
dreariness. He had no enthusiasm for war. In every aspect of life, save
one, that he dealt with, he carried a cool and level head, and he
thought war barbarous and its waste a great tragedy. Martial music and
earth-shaking charges moved him for a moment, as they moved others for
an hour or a day. The old, instinctive response passed with swiftness,
and he settled to the base of a steadfast conclusion that humanity
turned aside to the jungle many times too often in a century. That,
individually, he had turned into a certain other allied jungle, he was
conscious--not sardonically conscious, for here all his judgment was
warped, but conscious. His mind ranged in this jungle with an unhappy
fury hardly modern.

As he rode he looked toward Richmond. He knew, though he scarcely knew
how he knew, that Judith Cary was there. He had himself meant to ride to
Richmond that idle twenty-eighth. Then had come the necessity of
accompanying Ewell to Dispatch Station, and his chance was gone. The
Stonewall Brigade had been idle enough.... Perhaps, the colonel of the
65th had gone.... It was a thick and bitter jungle, and he gathered
every thorn within it to himself and smelled of every poisonous flower.

The small, silent cavalcade came to a cross-roads. Jackson stopped,
sitting Little Sorrel beneath a tall, gaunt, lightning-blackened pine.
The three with him waited a few feet off. Behind them they heard the
on-coming column; D. H. Hill leading, then Jackson's own division. The
sun was above the treetops, the sky cloudless, all the forest
glistening. The minutes passed. Jackson sat like a stone. At last, from
the heavy wood pierced by the cross-road, came a rapid clatter of hoofs.
Munford appeared, behind him fifty of his cavalry. The fifty checked
their horses; the leader came on and saluted. Jackson spoke in the
peculiar voice he used when displeased. "Colonel Munford, I ordered you
to be here at