him water and made him as comfortable as possible. I got
permission from my General while the battle raged and sent his
message with a flag of truce to his wife. She came flying to his
side at the risk of her life, got to the rear and saved him.
Perhaps I wasn't an ideal soldier in that pause in my fight. But I
had to do it, dearest. It was your sweet spirit that stopped me and
sent the white flag of love and mercy.

"And the strangest of all the things of the war happened that
night. I spent six hours among the wounded, helping the poor boys
all I could--both blue and grey--and I suddenly ran into John at
the same pitiful work. It's curious how all the bitterness is gone
out of my heart.

"I grabbed him and hugged him, and we both cried like two fools. We
sat down between the lines in the brilliant moonlight and talked
for an hour. I told him of you, dearest, and he wished me all the
happiness life could give, but with a queer hitch in his voice, and
after a long silence, which made me wonder if he, too, had not been
loving you in secret. I shouldn't wonder if every man who sees you
loves you. The wonder to me is they don't.

"Our band is playing an old-fashioned Southern song that sets my
heart to beating with joyous madness again. I'm dreaming through
that song of the home I'm going to build for you somewhere in the
land of sunshine. Don't worry about me. I'm not going to die. I
know I'm immortal now. I had faith once. Now I know--because I love
you and time is too short to tell and all too short to live my
love.

"NED."

She read it over twice through eyes that grew dim with each foolish,
sweet extravagance. And then she went back and read for the third time
the line about John, threw herself across her bed and burst into tears.

CHAPTER XXXII

THE WHIRLWIND

The draft of half a million men was scarcely completed when Rosecrans'
Western army, advancing into Georgia, met with crushing defeat at
Chickamauga, "The River of Death." His shattered hosts were driven back
into Chattanooga with the loss of eighteen thousand men in a rout so
complete and stunning that Charles A. Dana, the Assistant Secretary of
War, telegraphed the President from the front that it was another "Bull
Run."

Rosecrans himself wired that he had met with a terrible disaster.