at in front. He spoke now
in a curious, dreamy voice. "Get off the top of my broken leg--damn you
to everlasting hell!" Steve squirmed to one side. "Sorry. Gawd knows I
wish I wasn't any nearer it than the Peaks of Otter!" There was a
triangular tear in the canvas. He drew down the flap and looked out.
"They were Ashby's men--all those three!" He began to cry, though
noiselessly. "They hadn't ought to cut at me like that--shooting, too,
without looking! They ought to ha' seen I wasn't no damned Yank--" The
figure in the straw moved. Steve turned sick with apprehension. "Did you
hear what I said? I was just a-joking. Gawd! It's enough to make a man
wish he was a Johnny Reb--Hey, what did you say?"

But the figure in blue said nothing, or only some useless thing about
wanting water. Steve, reassured, looked again out of window. His refuge
lay a few feet from the pike, and the pike was a road through
pandemonium. He could see, upon a height, dimly, through the dust and
smoke the Rockbridge battery. Yellow flashes came from it, then
ear-splitting sound. A Federal force, horse, foot and guns, had hastily
formed in the opposite fields, seized a crest, planted cannon. These
sent screaming shells. In between the iron giants roared the
melee--Ashby jousting with Hatch's convoying cavalry--the Louisiana
troops firing in a long battle line, from behind the stone fences--a
horrible jam of wagons, overturned or overturning, panic-stricken mules,
drivers raving out oaths, using mercilessly long, snaky, black
whips--heat, dust, thirst and thunder, wild excitement, blood and death!
There were all manner of wagons. Ambulances were there with
inmates,--fantastic sickrooms, with glare for shade, Tartarean heat for
coolness, cannon thunder and shouting for quietness, grey enemies for
nursing women, and for home a battlefield in a hostile land. Heavy
ordnance wagons, far from the guns they were meant to feed, traces cut
and horses gone, rested reef-like for the tides to break against.
Travelling forges kept them company, and wagons bearing officers'
luggage. Beneath several the mules were pinned; dreadful sight could any
there have looked or pitied! Looming through there were the great supply
wagons, with others of lighter stores, holding boxes and barrels of
wines and fruits, commodities of all sorts, gold-leafed fripperies,
luxuries of all manner, poured across the Potomac for her soldiers by
the North. Sutlers' wagons did not lack, garis