Runyon for them to attack! It was a mistake and a confusion of identity.
The crossing troops were Confederates--D. R. Jones returning from the
position he had held throughout the day to the southern bank of Bull
Run. The dark had come, the troops were much exhausted, the routed army
by now at Centreville. Beauregard did the only thing that could be
done,--ordered the men to halt and bivouac for the night in the woods
about the stream.

Back upon the Sudley Road Stuart and his troopers followed for twelve
miles the fugitive army. There was a running fight; here and there the
enemy was cut off; great spoil and many prisoners were taken. Encumbered
with all of these, Stuart at Sudley Church called off the chase and
halted for the night. At the bridge over Cub Run Munford with a handful
of the Black Horse and the Chesterfield Troop, a part of Kershaw's
regiment and Kemper's battery meeting the retreat as it debouched into
the Warrenton turnpike, heaped rout on rout, and confounded confusion. A
wagon was upset upon the bridge, it became impassable, and Panic found
that she must get away as best she might. She left her congressmen's
carriages, her wagons of subsistence, and her wagons of ammunition, her
guns and their caissons, her flags and her wounded in ambulances; she
cut the traces of the horses and freed them from pleasure carriage, gun
carriage, ammunition wagon, and ambulance; with these horses and afoot,
she dashed through the water of Cub Run, and with the long wail of the
helpless behind her, fled northward through the dusk. A little later,
bugles, sounding here and there beneath the stars, called off the
pursuit.

* * * * *

The spoil of Manassas included twenty-eight fieldpieces with a hundred
rounds of ammunition to each gun, thirty-seven caissons, six forges,
four battery wagons, sixty-four artillery horses, five hundred thousand
rounds of small arm ammunition, four thousand five hundred sets of
accoutrements, four thousand muskets, nine regimental and garrison
flags, pistols, swords, musical instruments, knapsacks, canteens,
blankets, tents, officers' luggage, rope, handcuffs, axes, and
intrenching tools, wagons, horses, camp and garrison equipage, hospital
stores and subsistence, and one thousand four hundred and twenty-one
prisoners.

History has not been backward with a question. Why did not the
Confederate forces press the pursuit to the Potomac, twenty-five miles
away?