bodies, dragging them by the heels one by one, and throwing them into
the trenches. He was just about to begin on the last stack when he saw
that he had left one lying a little further back in the shadows.

Julius looked at it dubiously and scratched his head. He didn't like the
idea of going so far back in the dark, away from the light, but there
was no help for it. The guard stood with his musket scowling:

"Get a move on you--damn you, don't stand there!" he growled.

Julius walled his eyes at his tormentor and ran for the body. It
happened to be the sleeping form of a tired guard who had been up three
nights. The negro grabbed his legs and rushed toward the lights and the
trenches.

He had almost reached the grave when the corpse gave a vicious kick and
yelled:

"Here--what'ell!"

Julius didn't stop to look or to answer. What he felt in his hands was
enough. With a yell of terror he dropped the thing and plunged straight
ahead.

"Gawd, save me!" he gasped.

His foot slipped on the edge of the trench and he rolled in the dark
hole. With the leap of a frightened panther he reached the solid earth
and flew, each leap a muttered prayer:

"Save me! Lawd, save me!"

Standing there beside the grim piles of his dead comrades John Vaughan
joined the guard in uncontrollable laughter. It was many a day before he
saw his cook again.

The laughter suddenly stopped, and he turned from the scene with a
shudder.

"I wonder," he muttered, "if I live through this war, whether I'll come
out of it with a soul!"

The report from Chancellorsville drifted slowly, ominously, appallingly,
over Washington with the clouds and mists of the storm which swept up
the Potomac and shrouded the city in a grey mantle of mourning. The
White House was still. The dead were walking through its great rooms of
state. The anguished heart who watched by the window toward the hills of
Virginia saw and heard each muffled footfall.

He walked to the table with stumbling, uncertain step at last, his face
ghastly and rigid, its color grey ashes, his deep set eyes streaming
with tears, sank helplessly into a chair, and for the first time gave
way to despair:

"O my God! My God! what will the country say!"

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE MOONLIT RIVER

Betty Winter was quick to answer the hurry call for more nurses in the
field hospital at Chancellorsville. The results at the end of three
days' carnage had paralyzed the service.

She left th