trifle
askew; his coat was buttoned only at the sword-belt, showing a
considerable expanse of white shirt, tolerably clean for that stage of
the campaign. But the negligence was all in his dress and bearing; in
his face was a look of intense interest in his surroundings. His gray
eyes, which seemed occasionally to strike right and left across the
landscape, like search-lights, were for the most part fixed upon the sky
beyond the Notch; until he should arrive at the summit of the road there
was nothing else in that direction to see. As he came opposite his
division and brigade commanders at the road-side he saluted mechanically
and was about to pass on. The colonel signed to him to halt.

"Captain Coulter," he said, "the enemy has twelve pieces over there on
the next ridge. If I rightly understand the general, he directs that you
bring up a gun and engage them."

There was a blank silence; the general looked stolidly at a distant
regiment swarming slowly up the hill through rough undergrowth, like a
torn and draggled cloud of blue smoke; the captain appeared not to have
observed him. Presently the captain spoke, slowly and with apparent
effort:

"On the next ridge, did you say, sir? Are the guns near the house?"

"Ah, you have been over this road before. Directly at the house."

"And it is--necessary--to engage them? The order is imperative?"

His voice was husky and broken. He was visibly paler. The colonel was
astonished and mortified. He stole a glance at the commander. In that
set, immobile face was no sign; it was as hard as bronze. A moment later
the general rode away, followed by his staff and escort. The colonel,
humiliated and indignant, was about to order Captain Coulter in arrest,
when the latter spoke a few words in a low tone to his bugler, saluted,
and rode straight forward into the Notch, where, presently, at the
summit of the road, his field-glass at his eyes, he showed against the
sky, he and his horse, sharply defined and statuesque. The bugler had
dashed down the speed and disappeared behind a wood. Presently his bugle
was heard singing in the cedars, and in an incredibly short time a
single gun with its caisson, each drawn by six horses and manned by its
full complement of gunners, came bounding and banging up the grade in a
storm of dust, unlimbered under cover, and was run forward by hand to
the fatal crest among the dead horses. A gesture of the captain's arm,
some strangely agile movements o