tops on
the hill.

An ambulance, drawn by a white and a bay horse, turned gayly from the road
into the meadow, and he saw, with surprise, that one of the surgeons was
trimming his finger nails with a small penknife. The surgeon was a slight
young man, with pointed yellow whiskers, and light blue eyes that squinted
in the sunshine. As he passed he stifled a yawn with an elaborate
affectation of unconcern.

A man on horseback, with a white handkerchief tied above his collar,
galloped up and spoke in a low voice to the Colonel. Then, as his horse
reared, he glanced nervously about, grew embarrassed, and, with a sharp
jerk of the bridle, galloped off again across the field. Presently other
men rode back and forth along the road; there were so many of them that Dan
wondered, bewildered, if anybody was left to make the battle beyond the
hill.

The regiment formed into line and started at "double quick" across the
broad meadow powdered white with daisies. As it went into the ravine,
skirting the hillside, a stream of men came toward it and passed slowly to
the rear. Some were on stretchers, some were stumbling in the arms of
slightly wounded comrades, some were merely warm and dirty and very much
afraid. One and all advised the fresh regiment to "go home and finish
ploughing." "The Yankees have got us on the hip," they declared
emphatically. "Whoopee! it's as hot as hell where you're going." Then a
boy, with a blood-stained sleeve, waved his shattered arm in the air and
laughed deliriously. "Don't believe them, friends, it's glorious!" he
cried, in the voice of the far South, and lurched forward upon the grass.

The sight of the soaked shirt and the smell of blood turned Dan faint. He
felt a sudden tremor in his limbs, and his arteries throbbed dully in his
ears. "I didn't know it was like this," he muttered thickly. "Why, they're
no better than mangled rabbits--I didn't know it was like this."

They wound through the little ravine, climbed a hillside planted in thin
corn, and were ordered to "load and lie down" in a strip of woodland. Dan
tore at his cartridge with set teeth; then as he drove his ramrod home, a
shell, thrown from a distant gun, burst in the trees above him, and a red
flame ran, for an instant, along the barrel of his musket. He dodged
quickly, and a rain of young pine needles fell in scattered showers from
the smoked boughs overhead. Somewhere beside him a man was groaning in
terror or in pain. "I'm hit,