r's stroke, fell upon his head; but his
nerves had grown steady and his thoughts were not of himself; he was
watching, with breathless interest, for another of the gray shadows at the
guns to go down among the fallen horses.

Then, while he watched, he saw other batteries come out upon the hill; saw
the cannon thrown into position and heard the call change from "grape!" to
"canister!" On the edge of the pines a voice was speaking, and beyond the
voice a man on horseback was riding quietly back and forth in the open.
Behind him Jack Powell called out suddenly, "We're ready, Colonel Burwell!"
and his voice was easy, familiar, almost affectionate.

"I know it, boys!" replied the Colonel in the same tone, and Dan felt a
quick sympathy spring up within him. At that instant he knew that he loved
every man in the regiment beside him--loved the affectionate Colonel, with
the sleepy voice, loved Pinetop, loved the lieutenant whose nose he had
broken after drill.

At a word he had leaped, with the others, to his feet, and stood drawn up
for battle against the wood. Then it was that he saw the General of the day
riding beside fluttering colours across the waste land to the crest of the
hill. He was rallying the scattered brigades about the flag--so the fight
had gone against them and gone badly, after all.

Around him the men drifted back, frightened, straggling, defeated, and the
broken ranks closed up slowly. The standards dipped for a moment before a
sharp fire, and then, as the colour bearers shook out the bright folds,
soared like great red birds' wings above the smoke.

It seemed to Dan that he stood for hours motionless there against the
pines. For a time the fight passed away from him, and he remembered a
mountain storm which had caught him as a boy in the woods at Chericoke. He
heard again the cloud burst overhead, the soughing of the pines and the
crackling of dried branches as they came drifting down through interlacing
boughs. The old childish terror returned to him, and he recalled his mad
rush for light and space when he had doubled like a hare in the wooded
twilight among the dim bodies of the trees. Then as now it was not the open
that he feared, but the unseen horror of the shelter.

Again the affectionate voice came from the sunlight and he gripped his
musket as he started forward. He had caught only the last words, and he
repeated them half mechanically, as he stepped out from the brushwood. Once
again, whe