ay to the Warrenton
turnpike. Almost immediately Ewell's and Taliaferro's divisions were
under arms and moving north.

Near Groveton they struck the force they were going against--King's
division of McDowell's corps moving tranquilly toward Centreville. The
long blue column--Doubleday, Patrick, Gibbon, and Hatch's
brigades--showed its flank. It moved steadily, with jingle and creak of
accoutrements, with soldier chat and laughter, with a band playing a
quickstep, with the rays of the declining sun bright on gun-stock and
bayonet, and with the deep rumble of the accompanying batteries. The
head of the column came in the gold light to a farmhouse and an apple
orchard. Out of the peace and repose of the scene burst a roar of grey
artillery.

The fight was fierce and bloody, and marked by a certain savage
picturesqueness. Gibbon and Doubleday somehow deployed and seized a
portion of the orchard. The grey held the farmhouse and the larger part
of the fair, fruit-bearing slopes. The blue brought their artillery into
action. The grey batteries, posted high, threw their shot and shell over
the heads of the grey skirmishers into the opposing ranks: Wooding,
Poague, and Carpenter did well; and then, thundering through the woods,
came John Pelham of Stuart's Horse Artillery, and he, too, did well.

As for the infantry, grey and blue, they were seasoned troops. There was
no charging this golden afternoon. They merely stood, blue and grey, one
hundred yards apart, in the sunset-flooded apple orchard, and then in a
twilight apple orchard, and then in an apple orchard with the stars
conceivably shining above the roof of smoke, and directed each against
the other a great storm of musketry, round shot, and canister.

It lasted two and a half hours, that tornado, and it never relaxed in
intensity. It was a bitter fight, and there was bitter loss. Doubleday
and Gibbon suffered fearfully, and Ewell and Taliaferro suffered. Grey
and blue, they stood grimly, and the tornado raged. The ghosts of the
quiet husbandmen who had planted the orchard, of the lovers who may have
walked there, of the children who must have played beneath the
trees--these were scared far, far from the old peaceful haunt. It was a
bitter fight.

Stafford was beside Ewell when the latter fell, a shell dreadfully
shattering his leg. The younger man caught him, drew him quite from poor
old Rifle, and with the help of the men about got him behind the slight,
slight sh