re have you been all this time, nigger?" John asked.

"Who, me?"

"And where'd you get that new suit of clothes?"

"Well, I'm gwine tell ye Gawd's truf, Marse John. Atter dat Cold Harbor
business I lit out fur de odder side. I wuz gittin' 'long very well dar
wid General Elliot in de Confederacy when all of er sudden somfin'
busted an' blowed me clean back inter de Union. An' here I is--yassah.
An' I'se gwine ter stick by you now. 'Pears lak de ain't no res' fur de
weary no whar."

John was glad to have his enterprising cook once more and received the
traitor philosophically.

Lee threw A. P. Hill's corps between Warren and Hancock's advancing
division. Hancock entrenched himself along-the railroad which he was
destroying.

Hill trained his artillery on these trenches and charged them with swift
desperation late in the afternoon. The Union lines were broken and
crushed and the men fled in panic. In vain "Hancock the Superb," who had
seen his soldiers fall but never fail, tried to rally them. In agony he
witnessed their utter rout. His trenches were taken, his guns captured
and turned in a storm of death on his fleeing men. He lost twelve stands
of colors, nine big guns and twenty-five hundred men.

As the darkness fell General Nelson A. Miles succeeded in rallying a new
line and stayed the panic by a desperate countercharge.

Once more the grapple was hand to hand, man to man, in the darkness.
John Vaughan had fired the last load, save one, from his revolver, and
sword in hand, was cheering his men in a mad effort to regain their lost
entrenchments. Blue and grey were mixed in black confusion. Only by the
light of flashing guns could friend be distinguished from foe. A musket
flamed near his face and through the deep darkness which followed a
sword thrust pierced his side. He sprang back with an oath and clinched
with his antagonist, feeling for his throat in silence. For a minute
they wheeled struggled and fought in desperation, stumbling over
underbrush, slipping to their knees and rising. Every instinct of the
fighting brute in man was up now and the battle was to the death for
one--perhaps both.

John succeeded at last in releasing his right hand and drawing his
revolver. His enemy sprang back at the same moment and through the
darkness again came the sword into his breast. He felt the blood
following the blade as it was snatched away, raised his revolver and
fired his last shot squarely at his foe. The mu