aner,
seemed to rise from the earth in the dead man's tracks, to fall in his
turn.

With the ruined guns lay the ruined men--alongside the wreckage, under
it and atop of it; and back down the road--a ghastly procession!--crept
on hands and knees such of the wounded as were able to move. The
colonel--he had compassionately sent his cavalcade to the right about--
had to ride over those who were entirely dead in order not to crush
those who were partly alive. Into that hell he tranquilly held his way,
rode up alongside the gun, and, in the obscurity of the last discharge,
tapped upon the cheek the man holding the rammer--who straightway fell,
thinking himself killed. A fiend seven times damned sprang out of the
smoke to take his place, but paused and gazed up at the mounted officer
with an unearthly regard, his teeth flashing between his black lips, his
eyes, fierce and expanded, burning like coals beneath his bloody brow.
The colonel made an authoritative gesture and pointed to the rear. The
fiend bowed in token of obedience. It was Captain Coulter.

Simultaneously with the colonel's arresting sign, silence fell upon the
whole field of action. The procession of missiles no longer streamed
into that defile of death, for the enemy also had ceased firing. His
army had been gone for hours, and the commander of his rear-guard, who
had held his position perilously long in hope to silence the Federal
fire, at that strange moment had silenced his own. "I was not aware of
the breadth of my authority," said the colonel to anybody, riding
forward to the crest to see what had really happened. An hour later his
brigade was in bivouac on the enemy's ground, and its idlers were
examining, with something of awe, as the faithful inspect a saint's
relics, a score of straddling dead horses and three disabled guns, all
spiked. The fallen men had been carried away; their torn and broken
bodies would have given too great satisfaction.

Naturally, the colonel established himself and his military family in
the plantation house. It was somewhat shattered, but it was better than
the open air. The furniture was greatly deranged and broken. Walls and
ceilings were knocked away here and there, and a lingering odor of
powder smoke was everywhere. The beds, the closets of women's clothing,
the cupboards were not greatly dam-aged. The new tenants for a night
made themselves comfortable, and the virtual effacement of Coulter's
battery supplied them wi