t this time, O Lord, and you can have me--I'll be
good!"

He paused for breath and turned to Ned:

"Now look!--Comin' or goin'?"

"That follow with the flag cussin' the men has dropped----"

"Thank God!"

"Another's lifted it----"

"Lord, save us!"

"Why don't you lie down, ye damn fool," Tom shouted. "I'm huggin' the
ground so close now I don't want a piece of paper under me, and if
there's got to be a piece I don't want no writin' on it!"

"Now look, are they comin'?" the pious boy gasped.

Ned made no answer. His wide set eyes were staring at the man who had
caught that color-bearer in his arms and was carrying him to the rear.

It was John Vaughan!

His lips were moving now in silent prayer and his sword hung limp in his
hands.

Through chattering teeth he cried:

"Don't shoot that fellow carrying his friend down the hill, boys!"

"They're runnin' now?" the pious one asked.

"It isn't war--it's a massacre!" Ned sighed.

The man of prayer leaped on the ditch bank suddenly and shook his fist
defiantly.

"Come back here, you damned cowards!" he yelled. "Come back and we'll
whip hell out o' you!"

Slowly the shattered regiment fell back down the bloody slope, stumbling
over their dead and wounded. The dim smoke-bound valley was a slaughter
pen. Where magnificent lines of blue had marched with flashing bayonets
and streaming banners at eight o'clock, the dead lay in mangled heaps,
and the wounded huddled among them slowly freezing to death.

John saw a magnificent gun a heap of junk with four dead horses and
every cannoneer on the ground dead or freezing where they fell. A single
shell had done the work. Riderless horses galloped wildly over the
field, shying at the grim piles of dark blue bodies, sniffing the blood
and neighing pitifully.

Twelve hundred men in his regiment had charged up that hill. But two
hundred and fifty came down.

From the steeple of the Court House in Fredericksburg General Couch, in
command of the Second Corps, stood with his glasses on this frightful
scene. He whispered to Howard by his side:

"The whole plain is covered with our men fallen and falling--I've never
seen anything like it!"

He paused, his lips quivering as he gasped:

"O my God! see them falling--poor fellows, falling--falling!"

He signalled Burnside for reinforcements.

General Sumner's division on the Union right had charged into the
deadliest trap of all.

Down the road toward the foot of