n suddenly reined in his little sorrel and
turned his keen blue eyes on his grey-haired Chief:

"There's just one way, General Lee. The front and left are too strong. I
can swing my corps in a quick movement to the rear while you attack the
front. They will think it a retreat. Out of sight, I'll turn, march for
ten miles around their right wing, and smash it from the rear before
sundown."

Lee quickly approved the amazing plan of his lieutenant, though it
involved the necessity of his holding Hooker's centre and left in check
and that his nine thousand men behind the stone wall on Marye's Heights
should hold Sedgwick's forty thousand. He believed it could be done
until Jackson had completed his march.

He immediately ordered his attack on the centre and left of his enemy.
The artillery horses were cropping the tender dew-laden grass with
eagerness. They had had no breakfast. The riders sprang to their backs
at seven o'clock and they dashed into position.

Lee's guns opened the fateful day. For hours his lines blazed with the
steady sullen boom of artillery and rattle of musketry. Hooker's hosts
replied in kind.

At noon a shout swept the Federal lines that Lee's army was in retreat.
Sickles' division could see the long grey waves hurrying to the rear.
They were close enough to note the ragged, dirty, nondescript clothes
Jackson's men wore. No man in all the Union hosts doubted for a moment
that Lee had seen the hopelessness of his position and was hurrying to
save his little army of sixty-two thousand men from being crushed into
pulp by the jaws of a hundred and thirty thousand in two grand divisions
closing in on him. It was a reasonable supposition--always barring the
utterly unexpected--another name for Stonewall Jackson, whom they seemed
to have forgotten for the moment.

Sickles, seeing the "retreat," sent a courier flying to Hooker, asking
for permission to follow the fugitives with his twenty thousand men.
Hooker consented, and Sickles leaped from his entrenchments and set out
in mad haste to overtake the flying columns. He got nearly ten miles in
the woods away from the battle lines before he realized that the ghostly
men in grey had made good their escape. Certainly they had disappeared
from view.

It was five o'clock in the afternoon when Jackson's swift, silent
marchers began to draw near to the unsuspecting right wing of Hooker's
army under the command of General Howard.

Ned Vaughan was in Jackson