p there!"

The Colonel scratched his head, looked Ned over from head to heel and
broke into a laugh.

"Well, I'll be damned," he said at last. "Take him to the rear and
report to me to-night. I want to see you."

Ned saluted and hurried to the rear with his prisoner.

The sun was slowly sinking in a sea of blood. The red faded to purple,
the purple to grey, the grey into the shadows of night and still the
guns were thundering from their heights. It was nine o'clock before they
were silent and Lee's torn and mangled army lay down among their dead
and wounded to wait the dawn and renew the fight. They had been
compelled to breast the most devastating fire to which an assaulting
army had been subjected in the history of war. The trees of the woods
had been literally torn and mangled as if two cyclones had met and
ripped them to pieces.

The men dropped in their tracks to snatch a few hours' sleep.

The low ominous sounds that drifted from the darkness could not be
heeded till to-morrow. Here and there a lantern flickered as they picked
up a wounded man and carried him to the rear. Only the desperately
wounded could be helped. The dead must sleep beneath the stars. The low,
pitiful cries for water guided the ambulance corps as they stumbled over
the heaps of those past help.

The clouds drew a veil over the stars at midnight and it began to pour
down rain before day. The sleeping, worn men woke with muttered oaths
and stood against the trees or squatted against their trunks seeking
shelter from the flood. As the mists lifted, they looked with grim
foreboding but still desperate courage to the heights. Every rampart was
deserted. Not one of those three hundred and forty guns remained.
McClellan had withdrawn his army under the cover of the night to
Harrison's Landing.

It would be difficult to tell whose men were better satisfied.

"Thank God, he's gone from there anyhow!" the men in grey cried with
fervor.

Now they could get something to eat, bury their dead and care for all
the wounded. McClellan's Peninsula Campaign had ended. His Grand Army
had melted from a hundred and ten thousand fighting men in line to
eighty-six thousand. The South had lost almost as many.

From the wildest panic into which the advance of his army had thrown
Richmond, the Confederate Capital now swung to the opposite extreme of
rejoicing for the deliverance, mingled with criticism of their leaders
for allowing the Federal army to esca