I am going, colonel. I have seen what I wished to see. Who is the man
who took up the shell?"

Pelham turned to the howitzer. "Which of you was it?"

Half a dozen voices were raised in answer. "Deaderick, sir. But he
burned his hands badly and he asked the lieutenant if he could go to the
rear--"

"Good, good!" said Stonewall Jackson. "He did well. But there are many
brave men in this army." He went back to Little Sorrel, where he stood
cropping the dried grass, and stiffly mounted. As he turned from the
platform and the guns, all lit again by the orange glare, there came
from the right an accession of sound, then high, shrill, and triumphant
the Confederate yell. A shout arose from the Horse Artillery. "They're
breaking! they're breaking! Burnside, too, is breaking! Yaaaii!
Yaaaaiiihh! Yaaaaaiiihhh!"

CHAPTER XLIV

BY THE OPEQUON

The battle of Sharpsburg was a triumph neither for blue nor grey, for
North nor South. With the sinking of the sun ceased the bloody,
prolonged, and indecisive struggle. Blue and grey, one hundred and
thirty thousand men fought that battle. When the pale moon came up she
looked on twenty-one thousand dead and wounded.

The living ranks sank down and slept beside the dead. Lee on Traveller
waited by the highroad until late night. Man by man his generals came to
him and made their report--their ghastly report. "Very good, general.
What is your opinion?"--"I think, sir, that we should cross the Potomac
to-night."--"Very well, general. What is your opinion?"--"General Lee,
we should cross the Potomac to-night."--"Yes, general, it has been our
heaviest field. What is your advice?"--"General Lee, I am here to do
what you tell me to do."

Horse and rider, Traveller and Robert Edward Lee, stood in the pale
light above the Antietam. "Gentlemen, we will not cross the Potomac
to-night. If General McClellan wants to fight in the morning I will give
him battle again.--And now we are all very tired. Good-night.
Good-night!"

The sun came up, dim behind the mist. The mist rose, the morning
advanced. The September sunshine lay like vital warmth upon the height
and vale, upon the Dunkard church and the wood about it, upon the
cornfields, and Burnside's bridge and the Bloody Lane, and upon all the
dead men in the cornfields, in the woods, upon the heights, beside the
stream, in the lane. The sunshine lay upon the dead, as the prophet upon
the Shunamite's child, but it could not reanimate. G