s surrendered!"

"What! Grant surrendered?" thundered the line, with muskets at a trail as
it rushed into the open.

"No, you blasted fools--we've surrendered," shouted the voice, rising
hoarsely in a gasping indignation.

"Surrendered, the deuce!" scoffed the men, as they fell back into ranks.
"I'd like to know what General Lee will think of your surrender?"

A little Colonel, with his hand at his sword hilt, strutted up and down
before a tangle of dead thistles.

"I don't know what he thinks of it, he did it," he shrieked, without
pausing in his walk.

"It's a damn lie!" cried Dan, in a white heat. Then he threw his musket on
the ground, and fell to sobbing the dry tearless sobs of a man who feels
his heart crushed by a sudden blow.

There were tears on all the faces round him, and Pinetop was digging his
great fists into his eyes, as a child does who has been punished before his
playmates. Beside him a man with an untrimmed shaggy beard hid his
distorted features in shaking hands.

"I ain't blubberin' fur myself," he said defiantly, "but--O Lord, boys--I'm
cryin' fur Marse Robert."

Over the field the beaten soldiers, in ragged gray uniforms, were lying
beneath little bushes of sassafras and sumach, and to the right a few
campfires were burning in a shady thicket. The struggle was over, and each
man had fallen where he stood, hopeless for the first time in four long
years. Up and down the road groups of Federal horsemen trotted with
cheerful unconcern, and now and then a private paused to make a remark in
friendly tones; but the men beneath the bushes only stared with hollow eyes
in answer--the blank stare of the defeated who have put their whole
strength into the fight.

Taking out his jack-knife, Dan unfastened the flag from the hickory pole on
which he had placed it, and began cutting it into little pieces, which he
passed to each man who had fought beneath its folds. The last bit he put
into his own pocket, and trembling like one gone suddenly palsied, passed
from the midst of his silent comrades to a pine stump on the border of the
woods. Here he sat down and looked hopelessly upon the scene before
him--upon the littered roads and the great blue lines encircling the
horizon.

So this was the end, he told himself, with a bitterness that choked him
like a grip upon the throat, this the end of his boyish ardour, his dream
of fame upon the battle-field, his four years of daily sacrifice and
suffering.