The Westerner smiled at John and stood motionless:

"Well, I'm damned!"

They waited breathlessly, afraid to look up into the boughs of the towering oak beneath which they were standing.

"Don't move now!" the man from the West cried, "and I'll pot him."

Slowly he stepped backward, softly, noiselessly, his eye fixed in the treetop, his gun raised and finger on the trigger.

He stopped, aimed, and fired.

John looked up and saw the grey figure fall back from the tree trunk and plunge downward, bounding from limb to limb and striking the ground within ten feet of where he stood with heavy thud. The blood was gushing in red streams from his nose and mouth.

They turned and hurried back to their lines—another fierce attack was being made on those guns. The men in grey charged and drove them a hundred feet before they rallied and pushed them back with frightful loss on both sides.

John's Captain fell, dangerously wounded, and lay fifty feet beyond their battle line. The dry leaves in the woods had taken fire from a shell and the blaze was nearing the wounded men. The Westerner coolly leaped from his position behind a tree, walked out in a hail of lead, picked up his wounded Commander, and carried him safely to the rear. He had just stepped back to take his stand in line by John's side when a flying piece of shrapnel tore a hole in his side. He dropped to his knees, sank lower to his elbow, turned his blue eyes to the darkening sky and slowly muttered as if to himself:

"Poor—little—wife—and—babies!"

The night was drawing her merciful veil over the scene at last. Jackson having crushed and mangled Hooker's right wing and rolled it back in red defeat over five miles in two hours, was slowly feeling his way on his last reconnaissance for the day to make his plans for the next. Through a fatal misunderstanding he was fired on by his own men and borne from the field fatally wounded.

A shiver of horror thrilled the Southerners when the news of Jackson's fall was whispered through the darkness.

At midnight Sickles led his division back into the dense woods and for three terrible hours the men on both sides fought as demons in the shadows. The long lines of blazing muskets in the darkness looked like the onward rush of a forest fire. At times two solid walls of flame seemed to leap through the tree tops into the starlit heavens. A small portion of the captured ground was recovered at a frightful loss—and no man knows to this day how many gallant men in blue were shot down by their own comrades in the darkness and confusion of that mad assault.

Hooker sent a desperate call to Sedgwick to hurry to his relief by carrying out his plan of sweeping Marye's Heights and falling on Lee's rear.

At dawn Stuart in command of Jackson's corps led the new charge on Hooker's lines, his grey veterans shouting:

"Remember Jackson!"

Through the long hours of the terrible third day of May the fierce combat of giants raged. During the morning Hooker's headquarters were reached by the Confederate artillery and the old Chancellor House, filled with the wounded, was knocked to pieces and set on fire. The women and children and slaves of the Chancellor family were shivering in its cellar while the shells were hurling its bricks and timbers in murderous fury on the helpless wounded who lay in hundreds in the yard. The men from both armies rushed into this hell and carried the wounded to a place of safety.

General Hooker was wounded and the report flew over the Federal army that he had been killed. To allay their fears the General had himself lifted into the saddle and rode down his lines and out of sight, when he was taken unconscious from his horse.

Sedgwick was fighting his way with desperation now to force Marye's Heights and strike Lee's rear.

Once more the stone wall blazed with death for the gallant men in blue. They dashed themselves against it wave on wave, only to fall back in confusion. They tried to flank it and failed. Hour after hour the mad charges rolled against this hill and broke in deep red pools at its base. There were but nine thousand men holding it against forty thousand, but it was afternoon before the grey lines slowly gave way and Sedgwick's victorious troops poured over the hill toward Lee's lines. Hooker had asked him to appear at daylight. The long rows and mangled heaps of the dead left on Marye's bloody slopes was sufficient answer to all inquiries as to his delay.

But the way was still blocked. The receding line of grey was suddenly supported by Early's division detached from Lee's reserves. Again Sedgwick was stopped and fought until dark.



As the sun was sinking over the smoke-wreathed spring-clothed trees of the wilderness, Stuart gathered Jackson's corps for a desperate assault on Hooker's last line of defense. Waving his plumed hat high above his handsome bearded face, he put himself at the head of his troops and charged, chanting with boyish enthusiasm his improvised battle song:

"Old—Joe—Hooker, Won't you come out o' the Wilderness! Come out o' the Wilderness! Come out o' the Wilderness!

Old—Joe—Hooker— Come out o' the Wilderness— Come—come—I say!"

The cheering grey waves swept all before them and left Lee in full possession of Chancellorsville and the whole position the Federal army had originally held.

As the Confederates rolled on, driving the fiercely fighting men in blue before them, Lee himself rode forward to encourage his men and then it happened—the thing for which the great have fought, and longed, and dreamed since time dawned—the spontaneous tribute of the brave to a trusted leader.

His victorious troops went wild at the sight of him. Above the crash and roar of battle rose the shouts of the Southerners:

"Hurrah for Lee!"

"Lee!"

"Lee!"

From lip to lip the thrilling name leaped until the wounded and the dying turned their eyes to see and raised their feeble voices:

"Lee!—Lee!—Lee!"

It was at this moment that he received the note from Jackson announcing that he was badly wounded. With the shouts of his men ringing in his ears, he drew his pencil and wrote across the pommel of his saddle:

"GENERAL: I have just received your note informing me that you are wounded. I cannot express my regret at the occurrence. Could I have directed events, I should have chosen, for the good of the country, to be disabled in your stead.

"I congratulate you upon the victory which is due to your skill and energy.

"Very respectfully, your obedient servant,

"R. E. LEE, "GENERAL."

It was quick, bloody work next day for the Southerner to turn and spring on Sedgwick with the ferocity of a tiger, crush and hurl his battered and bleeding corps back on the river.

Under cover of a storm General Couch, in command of Hooker's army, retreated across the Rappahannock. The blue and grey picket lines that night were so close to each other the men could talk freely. The Southern boys were chaffing the Northerners over their oft repeated defeats. Through the darkness a Yankee voice drawled:

"Ah, Johnnie, shut up—you make us tired! You're not so much as you think you are. Swap Generals with us and we'll come over and lick hell out of you!"

A silence fell over the boasting ones and then the listening Yankee heard a low voice chuckle to his comrade:

"I'm damned if they wouldn't, too!"

When the grey dawn broke through the storm they began to bury the dead and care for the wounded. The awful struggle had ended at last.

The Northern army had lost seventeen thousand men, the Southerners thirteen thousand.

It was a great victory for the South, but a few more such victories and there would be none of her brave boys left to tell the story.

John Vaughan's company had been detailed to help in cleaning the field. The day before, on Sunday morning, they had eaten their breakfast seated on the ground among hundreds of dead bodies whose odor poisoned the air. It is needless to say, Julius was not present. He had kept the river between him and the roar of contending hosts.

The suffering of the wounded had been terrible. Some of them had fallen on Friday, thousands on Saturday, and it was now Monday. All through the blood-soaked tangled woods they lay groaning and dying. And everywhere the flap of black wings. The keen-eyed vultures had seen from the sky where they fell.

John found a brave old farmer from Northern New York lying beside his son. He had met them in the fight at Fredericksburg in December.

"Well, here we are, Vaughan," the father cried feebly. "My boy's dead, and I'll be with him soon—but it's all right—it's all right—my country's worth it!"

They were lying in a bright open space, where the warm sun of May had pushed the wood violets into blossom in rich profusion. The dead boy's head lay in a bed of blue flowers.

Some of the bodies further on were black and charred by the flames that had swept the woods again and again during the battles. Some of them had been wounded men and they had been burned to death. Their twisted bodies and the agony on their cold faces told the hideous story more plainly than words. The odor of burning flesh still filled the air in these black spots.

With a start John suddenly came on the crouching figure of a Confederate soldier kneeling behind a stump, the paper end of the cartridge was in his teeth and his fingers still grasped the ball. He was just in the act of tearing the paper as a bullet crashed straight through his forehead. A dark streak of blood marked his face and clothes. His gun was in his other hand, the muzzle in place to receive the cartridge, the body cold and rigid in exactly the position death had called him.

A broad-shouldered, bearded man in blue had just fallen asleep nearby. The body was still warm, the blue eyes wide open, staring into the leaden sky. On his breast lay an open Bible with a bloody finger mark on the lines:

"The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want He maketh me to lie down in green pastures— He restoreth my soul."

A hundred yards further lay a dead boy from his own company. The stiff hands were still holding a picture of his sweetheart before the staring eyes. Near him lay a boy in grey with a sweetheart's letter clasped in his hand. They had talked and tried to cheer one another, these dying boys—talked of those they loved in far off villages as the mists of eternity had gathered about them.

It was late that night before the wounded had all been moved. Through every hour of its black watches the surgeons, with their sleeves rolled high, their arms red, bent over their tasks, until legs and arms were piled in ghastly heaps ten feet high.

As John Vaughan turned from the scene where he had laid a wounded man to wait his turn, his eye caught the look of terror on the face of a wounded Southern boy. He was a slender little dark-haired fellow, under sixteen, a miniature of Ned. The surgeon had just taken up his knife to cut into the deep flesh wound for the Minie ball embedded there. John saw the slender face go white and the terror-stricken young eyes search the room for help. His breath came in quick gasps and he was about to faint.

John slipped his arm around him:

"Just a minute, Doctor——"

He pressed his hand and whispered:

"Come now, little man, you're among your enemies. You've got to be brave. Show your grit for the South. I've got a brother in your army who looks like you. No white feather now when these Yankees can see you."

The slender figure stiffened and his eyes flashed:

"All right!" the sturdy lips cried. "Let him go ahead—I'm ready now!"

John held his hand, while the knife cut through the soft young flesh and found the lead. The grip of the slim fingers tightened, but he gave no cry. John handed him the bullet to put in his pocket and left him smiling his thanks.

He began to wonder vaguely if he had lost his cook forever. Julius should have found the regiment before this. It was just before day that he came on him working with might and main at a job that was the last one on earth he would have selected.

He had been seized by a burying squad and put to work dragging corpses to the trenches from the great piles where the wagons had dumped them.

The black man rolled his eyes in piteous appeal to his master:

"For Gawd's sake, Marse John, save me—dese here men won't lemme go. I been er throwin' corpses inter dem trenches since dark. I'se most dead frum work, let 'lone bein' scared ter death."

"Sorry, Julius," was the quick answer, "we've all got to work at a time like this. There's no help for it."

Julius bent again to his horrible task. The thing that appalled him was the way the dead men kept looking at him out of their eyes wide and staring in the flickering light of the lanterns.

John stood watching him thoughtfully. He had finished one pile of bodies, dragging them by the heels one by one, and throwing them into the trenches. He was just about to begin on the last stack when he saw that he had left one lying a little further back in the shadows.

Julius looked at it dubiously and scratched his head. He didn't like the idea of going so far back in the dark, away from the light, but there was no help for it. The guard stood with his musket scowling:

"Get a move on you—damn you, don't stand there!" he growled.

Julius walled his eyes at his tormentor and ran for the body. It happened to be the sleeping form of a tired guard who had been up three nights. The negro grabbed his legs and rushed toward the lights and the trenches.

He had almost reached the grave when the corpse gave a vicious kick and yelled:

"Here—what'ell!"

Julius didn't stop to look or to answer. What he felt in his hands was enough. With a yell of terror he dropped the thing and plunged straight ahead.

"Gawd, save me!" he gasped.

His foot slipped on the edge of the trench and he rolled in the dark hole. With the leap of a frightened panther he reached the solid earth and flew, each leap a muttered prayer:

"Save me! Lawd, save me!"

Standing there beside the grim piles of his dead comrades John Vaughan joined the guard in uncontrollable laughter. It was many a day before he saw his cook again.

The laughter suddenly stopped, and he turned from the scene with a shudder.

"I wonder," he muttered, "if I live through this war, whether I'll come out of it with a soul!"

The report from Chancellorsville drifted slowly, ominously, appallingly, over Washington with the clouds and mists of the storm which swept up the Potomac and shrouded the city in a grey mantle of mourning. The White House was still. The dead were walking through its great rooms of state. The anguished heart who watched by the window toward the hills of Virginia saw and heard each muffled footfall.

He walked to the table with stumbling, uncertain step at last, his face ghastly and rigid, its color grey ashes, his deep set eyes streaming with tears, sank helplessly into a chair, and for the first time gave way to despair:

"O my God! My God! what will the country say!"



CHAPTER XXVIII

THE MOONLIT RIVER

Betty Winter was quick to answer the hurry call for more nurses in the field hospital at Chancellorsville. The results at the end of three days' carnage had paralyzed the service.

She left the Carver Hospital on receipt of the first cry for help and hurried to her home to complete her preparations to leave for the front.

Her father was at breakfast alone.

She called her greeting from the hall, rushed to her room, packed a bag, and quickly came down.

She slipped her arm around his neck, bent and kissed him good-bye. He held her a moment:

"You must leave so early, dear?"

"I must catch the first bout for Aquia. The news from the front is hideous. The force there is utterly inadequate. They've asked for every nurse that can be spared for a week. The wounded lay on the ground for three days and nights, and hundreds of them can't be moved to Washington. The woods took fire dozens of times and many of the poor boys were terribly burned. The suffering, they say, is indescribable."

The old man suddenly rose, with a fierce light flashing in his eyes:

"Oh, the miserable blunderer in the White House—this war has been one grim and awful succession of his mistakes!"

Betty placed her hand on his arm in tender protest:

"Father, dear, how can you be so unreasonable—so insanely unjust? Your hatred of the President is a positive mania——"

"I'm not alone in my affliction, child; Arnold is his only friend in Congress to-day——"

"Then it's a shame—a disgrace to the Nation. Every disaster is laid at his door. In his big heart he is carrying the burden of millions—their suffering, their sorrows, their despair. You blamed him at first for trifling with the war. Now you blame him for the bloody results when the army really fights. You ask for an effective campaign and when you get these tragic battles you heap on his head greater curses. It isn't right. It isn't fair. I can't understand how a man with your deep sense of justice can be so cruelly inconsistent——"

The Senator shook his grey head in protest:

"There! there! dear—we won't discuss it. You're a woman and you can't understand my point of view. We'll just agree to disagree. You like the man in the White House. God knows he's lonely—I shouldn't begrudge him that little consolation. His whole attitude in this war is loathsome to me. To him the Southerners are erring brethren to be brought back as prodigal sons in the end. To me they are criminal outlaws to be hanged and quartered—their property confiscated, the foundations of their society destroyed, and every trace of their States blotted from the map——"

"Father!"

"Until we understand that such is the purpose of the war we can get nowhere—accomplish nothing. But there, dear—I didn't mean to say so much. There is always one thing about which there can be no dispute—I love my little girl——"

He slipped his arm about her tenderly again.

"I'm proud of the work you're doing for our soldiers. They tell me in the big hospital that you're an angel. I've always known it, but I'm glad other people are beginning to find it out. In all the horrors of this tragedy there's one ray of sunshine for me—the light that shines from your eyes!"

He bent and kissed her again:

"Run now, and don't miss your boat."

In the five swift days of tender service which followed, Betty Winter forgot her own heartache and loneliness in the pity, pathos, and horror of the scenes she witnessed—the drawn white faces—the charred flesh, the scream of pain from the young, the sigh of brave men, the last messages of love—the gasp and the solemn silences of eternity.

When the strain of the first rush had ended and the time to follow the lines of ambulance wagons back to Washington drew near, the old anguish returned to torture her soul. She told herself it was all over, and yet she knew that somewhere in that vast city of tents, stretching for miles over the hills and valleys about Falmouth Heights, was John Vaughan. She had put him resolutely out of her life. She said this a hundred times—yet she was quietly rejoicing that his name was not on that black roll of seventeen thousand. All doubt had been removed by the announcement in the Republican of his promotion to the rank of Captain for gallantry on the field of Chancellorsville.

She hoped that he had freed himself at last from evil associates. She couldn't be sure—there were ugly rumors flying about the hospital of the use of whiskey in the army. These rumors were particularly busy with Hooker's name.

Seated alone in the quiet moonlight before the field hospital, the balmy air of the South which she drew in deep breaths was bringing back the memory of another now. The pickets had been at their usual friendly tricks of trading tobacco and coffee and exchanging newspapers. From a Richmond paper she had just learned that Ned Vaughan had fought in Lee's army at Chancellorsville. Somewhere beyond the silver mirror of the Rappahannock he was with the men in grey to-night. Her heart in its loneliness went out to him in a wave of tender sympathy. Again she lived over the tragic hours when she had fought the battle for his life and won at last at the risk of her own.

A soldier saluted and handed her a piece of brown wrapping paper, neatly folded. Its corner was turned down in the old-fashioned way of a schoolboy's note to his sweetheart.

She went to the light and saw with a start it was in Ned Vaughan's handwriting. She read, with eager, sparkling eyes.

"DEAREST: I've just seen in a Washington paper which our boys traded for that you are here. I must see you, and to-night. I can't wait. There will be no danger to either of us. Our pickets are on friendly terms. I've arranged everything with some good tobacco for your fellows. Follow the man who hands you this note to the river. A boat will be ready for you there with one of my men to row you across. I will be waiting for you at the old mill beside the burned pier of the railroad bridge.

"NED."

Betty's heart gave a bound of joy, and in half an hour she was standing on the shining shore of the river before the old mill. Its great wheel was slowly turning, the water falling in broken crystals sparkling in the moonlight. Through the windows of the brick walls peered the black-mouthed guns trained across the water.

She looked about timidly for a moment while the man in grey who had rowed her over made fast his boat.

He tipped his old slouch hat:

"This way, Miss."

He led her down close, to the big wheel, crossed the stream of water which poured from its moss-covered buckets, and there, beneath an apple tree in bloom, stood a straight, soldierly figure in the full blue uniform of a Federal Captain, exactly as she had seen Ned Vaughan that night in the Old Capitol Prison.

The soldier saluted and Ned said:

"Wait, Sergeant, at the water's edge with your boat."

He was gone and Ned grasped both Betty's hands and kissed them tenderly:

"My glorious little heroine! I just had to tell you again that the life you saved is all, all yours. You are glad to see me—aren't you?"

"I can't tell you how glad, Boy! How brown and well you look!"

"Yes, the hard life somehow agrees with me. It's a queer thing, this army business. It makes some men strong and clean, and others into beasts."

"And why did you wear that dangerous uniform, sir?" she asked, with a smile.

"In honor of a beautiful Yankee girl, my guest. I've not worn it since that night, Betty, until now——"

His voice dropped to a whisper:

"It has been a holy thing to me, this blue uniform that cost me the life which you gave back at the risk of your own——"

"I was in no danger. I had powerful friends."

"They might not have been powerful enough—but it's sacred for another reason—as precious to me as the seamless robe for which the Roman soldiers cast lots on Calvary—I wore it in the one glorious moment in which I held you in my arms, dearest."

"O Ned, Boy, you shouldn't be so foolish!"

"I'm not. I'm sensible. I've done no more scout work since. I said that my life was yours and I had no right to place it again in such mad danger——"

"And so you face death on the field!"

"Yes, come sit here, dearest, I've made a seat for you of the broken timbers from the bridge. We can see the moonlit river and the lazy turn of the old wheel while we talk."

He led her to the seat in the edge of the moonlight and Betty drew a deep breath of joy as she drank in the beauty of the entrancing scene. The shadows of night had hidden the scars of war. Only the tall stone piers standing, lone sentinels in the river, marked its ravages where the bridge had fallen. The moon had flung her sparkling silver veil over the blood-stained world.

"You know," Ned went on eagerly, "those big pillars won't stand there naked long. We'll put the timbers back on them soon and run our trains through to Washington——"

"Sh, Ned," Betty whispered, touching his arm lightly, "be still a moment, I want to feel this wonderful scene!"

The air was sweet with the perfume of apple blossoms, the water from the old wheel fell with silvery echo and ran rippling over the stones into the river. Somewhere above the cliff a negro was playing a banjo and far down the river, beside a little cottage torn with shot and shell, but still standing, a mocking-bird was singing in the lilac bushes.

The girl looked at Ned with curious tenderness, and wondered if she had known her own heart after all—wondered if the fierce blinding passion she had once felt for his brother had been the divine thing that links the soul to the eternal? A strange spiritual beauty enveloped this younger man and drew her to-night with new power. There was something restful in its mystery. She wondered vaguely if it were possible to love two men at the same moment. She could almost swear it were. If she had never really loved John Vaughan at all! Why had his powerful, brutal personality drawn her with such terrible power? Was such a force love? It was something different from the tender charm which enveloped the slender straight young figure by her side now. She felt this with increasing certainty.

Ned took her hand and kissed the tips of her fingers.

The touch of his lips sent a thrill through her heart. It was sweet to be worshipped in this old-fashioned, foolish way. Whatever her own feeling's might be, this was love—in its divinest flowering. It drew her to-night with all but resistless tug.

"May I break the silence now, dearest, to ask you something?" he said softly.

"Yes."

"Haven't you realized yet that you are going to be mine?"

"Not in the way you mean——"

"But you are, dearest, you are!" he whispered rapturously. "You love me. You just haven't really faced the thing yet and put it to the test in your heart. War has separated us, that's all. But there's never been a moment's doubt in my soul since I looked into your eyes that night in the old prison. Their light made the cell shine with the glory of heaven! And when you kissed me, dearest——"

"You know why I did that, Ned," she murmured.

"You're fooling yourself, darling! You couldn't have done what you did, if you hadn't loved me. It came to me in a flash as I held you in my arms and pressed you to my heart. There can be no other woman on earth for me after that moment. I lived a life time with it. Say you'll be mine, dearest?"

"But I don't love you, Ned, as you love me——"

"I don't ask it now. I can wait. The revelation will come to you at last in the fullness of time—promise me, dearest—promise me!"

For an hour he poured into her ears his passionate tender plea, until the rapture of his love, the perfumed air of the spring night, and the shimmer of moonlit waters stole into her lonely heart with resistless charm.

She lifted her lips to his at last and whispered:

"Yes."



CHAPTER XXIX

THE PANIC

The morning after Betty returned to Carver Hospital from the front, a mother was pouring out her heart in a burst of patriotic joy over a wounded boy.

She thought of the lonely figure in the White House treading the wine press of a Nation's sorrow alone and asked the mother to go with her to the President, meet him and repeat what she had said. She consented at once.

For the first time Betty failed to gain admission promptly. Mr. Stoddard, his third Secretary, was at the door.

"We must let him eat something, Miss Winter," he whispered. "All night the muffled sound of his footfall came from his room. I heard it at nine, at ten, at eleven. At midnight Stanton left his door ajar and his steady tramp, tramp, tramp, came with heavier sound. The last thing I heard as I left at three was the muffled beat upstairs. The guard told me it never stopped for a moment all night."

Betty was surprised to see his face illumined by a cheerful smile as she entered. She gazed with awe into the deep eyes of the man whose single word could stop the war and divide the Union. She wondered if he had fought the Nation's battle alone with God through the night until his prophetic vision had seen through cloud and darkness the dawn of a new and more wonderful life.

She spoke softly:

"I've brought you a good mother who lost a son at Fredericksburg. She has a message for you."

The tall form bent reverently and pressed her hand. A wonderful smile transfigured his rugged face as he listened:

"God help you in your trials, Mr. President, as he has helped me in mine——"

"And you lost your son at Fredericksburg?"

"Yes. It was long before I could feel reconciled. But I've been praying for you day and night since——"

"For me?"

"You must be strong and courageous, and God will bring the Nation through!"

"You say that to me, standing beside the grave of your son?"

"Yes, and beside the cot of my other boy who is here wounded from Chancellorsville. I'm proud that God gave me such sons to lay on the altar of my country. Remember, I am praying for you day and night!"

Both big hands closed over hers and he was silent a moment.

"It's all right then. I'll get new strength when I remember that such mothers are praying for me."

He pressed Betty's hand at the door:

"Thank you, child. You bring medicine that reaches soul and body!"

The hour of despair had passed and the President returned to his task patient, watchful, strong.

Daily the shadows deepened over the Nation's life. Blacker and denser rose the clouds. Four Northern Generals had now gone down before Lee's apparently invincible genius—McClellan, Pope, Burnside, and Hooker, and with each fall the corpses of young men were piled higher.

Again the clamor rose for the return of McClellan to command. This cry was not only heard in the crushed Army of the Potomac, it was backed by the voice of two million Democrats who had chosen the man on horseback as their leader.

It was for precisely this reason that McClellan could not be considered again for command. His party had fallen under the complete control of its Copperhead leaders who demanded the ending of the war at once and at any sacrifice of principle or of the Union.

The only way the President could stop desertions and prevent the actual secession of the great Northern States of the Middle West, now under the control of these men, was to use his arbitrary power to suspend the civil law and put them in prison. Through the State and War Departments he did this sorrowfully, but promptly.

His answer to his critics was the soundest reasoning and it justified him in the judgment of thinking men.

"I make such arrests," he declared, "because these men are laboring to prevent the raising of troops and encouraging desertion. Armies cannot be maintained unless desertion shall be punished by the penalty of death.

"I will not shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, and refuse to touch a wily agitator who induces him to commit the crime. To silence the agitator and save the boy is not only Constitutional, but withal a great mercy."

Volunteers were no longer to be had and a draft of five hundred thousand men had been ordered for the summer. The Democratic leaders in solid array were threatening to resist this draft by every means in their power, even to riot and revolution.

The masses of the North were profoundly discouraged at the unhappy results of the war. In thousands of patriotic loyal homes, men and women had begun to ask themselves whether it were not cruel folly to send their brave boys to be slaughtered.

The prestige of the Southern army was at its highest point and its terrible power was nowhere more gravely realized than in the North, whose thousands of mourning homes attested its valor.

Europe at last seemed ready to spring on the throat of America. Distinct reports were in circulation in the Old World that the Emperor of France, Napoleon III, intended to interfere in our affairs. On the 9th of January, the French Government denied this. The Emperor himself, however, sent to the President an offer of mediation so blunt and surprising it could not be doubted that it was a veiled hint of his purpose to intervene. Beyond a doubt he expected the Union to be dismembered and he proposed to form an alliance between the Latin Empire which he was founding in Mexico and the triumphant Confederate States.

Great Britain was behind this Napoleonic adventure. Outwitted by the President in the affair of the Trent, the British Government was eager for the chance to strike the Republic.

To cap the climax of disasters Lee was preparing to invade the North with his victorious army. The announcement struck terror to the Northern cities and produced a condition among them little short of panic.

The move would be the height of audacity and yet Lee had good reasons for believing its success possible and probable. His grey veterans were still ragged and poorly shod. With Southern ports blockaded and no manufacturing this was inevitable, but they had proven in two years' test of fire Lee's proud boast:

"There never were such men in an army before. They will go anywhere and do anything if properly led."

This opinion was confirmed to the President by Charles Francis Adams, a veteran of his own Army of the Potomac, whom he summoned to the White House for a conference.

"I do not believe," said Adams gravely, "that any more formidable or better organized and animated force was ever set in motion than that which Lee is now leading toward the North. It is essentially an army of fighters—men who individually, or in the mass, can be depended on for any feat of arms in the power of mere mortals to accomplish. They will blanch at no danger. Lee knows this from experience and they have full confidence in him."

He could not hope to enter Pennsylvania with more than sixty-five thousand men, but his plan was reasonable. With such an army he had hurled McClellan's hundred and ten thousand soldiers back from the gates of Richmond and scattered them to the winds. With a less number he had all but annihilated Pope's men and flung them back into Washington a disorganized rabble. With thirty-seven thousand grey soldiers he had repelled in a welter of blood McClellan's eighty-six thousand at Antietam and retired at his leisure. With seventy thousand men he had crushed Burnside's host of one hundred and thirteen thousand at Fredericksburg. With sixty thousand he had just struck Hooker's grand army of a hundred and thirty thousand men and four hundred and thirty-eight guns, rolled it up as a scroll and thrown it across the Rappahannock in blinding, bewildering defeat.

From every prisoner taken at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville he knew the Northern army was discouraged and heartsick. That he could march his ragged men, the flower of Southern manhood, into Pennsylvania and clothe and feed them on her boundless resources he couldn't doubt. Virginia was swept bare, and the demoralization of Hooker's army with the profound depression of the North left his way open.

To say that Lee's invasion, as it rapidly developed under such conditions, struck terror to the Capital of the Republic is to mildly express it. The movement of his army from Culpepper in June indicated clearly that his objective point was Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. If the Capital of the State fell, nothing could withstand the onward triumphant rush of his army into Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington.

To meet the extraordinary danger the President called for one hundred thousand militia for six months' emergency service from the five States clustering around Pennsylvania. And yet as the two armies drew near to each other, General George Meade, the new Union Commander who had succeeded Hooker, had but one hundred and five thousand against Lee's sixty-two thousand. So terrible had been the depression following Chancellorsville, so rapid the desertions, so numerous the leaves of absence, that the combined forces of the Army of the Potomac with the State troops under the new call reached only this pitiful total.

Lee's swift column penetrated almost to the gates of Harrisburg before Meade's advance division of twenty-five thousand men had caught up with his rear at Gettysburg on July 1st.

Seeing that a battle was inevitable, Lee drew in his advance lines and made ready for the clash. The Northern army was going into this fight with the smallest number of men relatively which he had ever met—though outnumbering him nearly two to one. The difference was that here the North was defending her own soil.

It was not surprising that on the eve of such a battle in the light of the frightful experiences of the past two years that Washington should be in a condition of panic. A single defeat now with Lee's victorious army north of the Capital meant its fall, the inevitable dismemberment of the Union, and the bankruptcy and ruin of the remaining Northern States.

Brave men in Congress who had fought heroically with their mouths inveighing with bitter invective against the weak and vacillating policy of the President in temporizing with the South were busy packing their goods and chattels to fly at a moment's notice.

The President realized, as no other man could, the deep tragedy of the crisis. He sat by his window for hours, his face a grey mask, his sorrowful eyes turned within, the deep-cut lines furrowed into his cheeks as though burned with red hot irons.

He was struggling desperately now to forestall the possible panic which would follow defeat.

He had sent once more for McClellan and in painful silence, all others excluded from the Executive Chamber, awaited his coming.

"You are doubtless aware, General," the President began, "that a defeat at Gettysburg might involve the fall of the Capital and the dismemberment of the Union?"

"I am, sir."

"First, I wish to speak to you with perfect frankness about some ugly matters which have come to my ears—may I?"

The compelling blue eyes flashed and the General spoke with an accent of impatience:

"Certainly."

"A number of Secret Societies have overspread the North and Northwest, whose purpose is to end the war at once and on any terms. I have the best of reasons for believing that the men back of these Orders are now in touch with the Davis Government in Richmond. I am informed that a coterie of these conspirators, a sort of governing board, have gotten control or may get control of the organization of your Party. I have heard the ugly rumor that they are counting on you——"

"Stop!" McClellan shouted.

The General sprang to his feet, the President rose and the two men confronted each other in a moment of tense silence.

The compact figure of McClellan was trembling with rage—the tall man's sombre eyes holding his with steady purpose.

"No man can couple the word treason with my name, sir!" the General hissed.

"Have I done so?"

"You are insinuating it—and I demand a retraction!"

The President smiled genially:

"Then I apologize for my carelessness of expression. I have never believed you a traitor to the Union."

"Thank you!"

"I don't believe it now, General. That's why I've sent for you."

"Then I suggest that you employ more caution in the use of words if this conversation is to continue."

"Again I apologize, General, with admiration for your manner of meeting the ugly subject. I'm glad you feel that way—and now if you will be seated we can talk business."

McClellan resumed his seat with a frown and the President went on:

"I have sent for you to ask an amazing thing——"

"Hence the secrecy with which I am summoned?"

"Exactly. I'm going to ask you to take my place and save the Union."

McClellan's handsome face went white:

"What do you mean?"

"Exactly what I've said."

"And your conditions?" the General asked, with a quiver in his voice.

"They are very simple: Preside to-morrow night at a great Democratic Union Mass Meeting in New York and boldly put yourself at the head of the Union Democracy——"

"And you?"

"I will withdraw from the race."

"What race?"

"For the next term of the Presidency."

"Oh——"

"My convention is but ten months off. Yours can meet a day earlier. I will withdraw in your favor and force my Party to endorse you. Your election will be a certainty."

The General lifted his hand with a curious smile:

"You're in earnest?"

"I was never more so. It is needless for me to say that I came into this office with high ambitions to serve my country. My dream of glory has gone—I have left only agony and tears——" He paused and drew a deep breath.

"I did want the chance," he went on wistfully, "to stay here another term to see the sun shine again, to heal my country's wounds, and show all my people, North, South, East, and West, that I love them! But I can't risk this new battle, if you will agree to take my place and save the Union. Will you preside over such a meeting?"

"No," was the sharp, clear answer.

"I am sorry—why?"

"Perhaps I am already certain of that election without your assistance?"

"Oh—I see."

"Besides, what right have you to ask anything of me?"

"Only the right of one who sinks all thought of himself in what he believes to be the greater good."

"You who, with victory in my grasp before Richmond, snatched it away! You, who nailed me to the cross on the bloody field of Antietam with your accursed Proclamation of Emancipation and removed me from my command before I could win my campaign!"

The big hand rose in kindly protest:

"Can't you believe me, General, when I tell you, with God as my witness, that I have never allowed a personal motive or feeling to enter into a single appointment or removal I have made? What I've done has always been exactly what I believed was for the best interests of the country. Can't you believe this?"

"No."

"In spite of the fact that I risked the dissolution of my Cabinet and the united opposition of my party when I restored you to command?"

"No—you had to do it."

"Grant then," the persuasive voice went on, "that I have treated you unfairly, that I had personal feelings. Surely you should in this hour of my reckoning, this hour of my Golgotha, when I climb the hill alone and ask the man I have wronged to take my place—surely you should be content with my humiliation? I shall not hesitate to proclaim it from the housetop when I ask for your election. If I have wronged you, my anguish could not be more pitifully complete! Will you do as I ask, and assure the safety of our country?"

"I'll do my best to save my country," was the slow, firm answer, "but in my own way."

The General rose, bowed stiffly and left the President standing in sorrowful silence, his deep eyes staring into space and seeing nothing.

On the morning of July 1st the two armies were rapidly approaching each other, marching in parallel lines stretched over a vast distance—the extreme wings more than forty miles apart.

Buford, commanding the advance guard of the Union army, struck Hill's division of the Confederates before the town of Gettysburg and the first gun of the great battle echoed over the green hills and valleys of Pennsylvania.

The President caught the flash of the shock from the telegraph wires with a sense of sickening dread. The rear guard of his army was yet forty miles away. What might happen before they were in line God alone could tell. He could not know, of course, that but twenty-two thousand Confederates had reached the field and stood confronting twenty-four thousand under John F. Reynolds, one of the ablest and bravest generals of the Union army.

Through every hour of this awful day he sat in the telegraph office of the War Department and read with bated breath the news.

The brief reports were not reassuring. The battle was raging with unparalleled fury. At ten o'clock General Reynolds fell dead from his horse in front of his men, and when the news was flashed to Meade he sent Hancock forward riding at full speed to take command.

The President read the message announcing Reynolds' death with quivering lip. He put his big hand blindly over his heart as if about to faint.

At three o'clock the smoke which had enveloped the battle line was lifted by a breeze as Hancock dashed on the field. He had not arrived a moment too soon. His superb bearing on his magnificent horse, his shouts of confidence, his promise of heavy reinforcements, stayed the tide of retreat and brought order out of chaos.

The day had been won again by Lee's apparently invincible men. They had driven the Union army from their line a mile in front of Gettysburg back through the town and beyond it, captured the town, taken five thousand men in blue prisoners with two generals, besides inflicting a loss of three thousand killed and wounded, including among the dead the gallant and popular commander, John F. Reynolds.

When this message reached the President late at night he had eaten nothing since breakfast. He rose from his seat in the telegraph office and walked from the building alone in silence. His step was slow, trance-like, and uncertain as if he were only half awake or had risen walking in his sleep.

He went to his bedroom, locked the door and fell on his knees in prayer. Hour after hour he wrestled alone with God in the darkness, while his tired army rushed through the night to plant themselves on the Heights beyond Gettysburg, before Lee's men could be concentrated to forestall them.

Over and over again, through sombre eyes that streamed with tears, the passionate cry was wrung from his heart:

"Lord God of our fathers, have mercy on us! I have tried to make this war yours—our cause yours—if I have sinned and come short, forgive! We cannot endure another Fredericksburg or Chancellorsville. Into thy hands, O Lord, I give our men and our country this night—save them!"



CHAPTER XXX

SUNSHINE AND STORM

When the sun rose over Gettysburg on the second day of July, the Union army, rushing breathlessly through the night to the rescue of its defeated advance corps, had reached the heights beyond the town. Before Longstreet had attempted to obey Lee's command to take these hills, General Meade's blue host had reached them and were entrenching themselves.

The Confederate Commander discovered that in the death of Jackson, he had lost his right arm.

It was one o'clock before Longstreet moved to the attack, hurling his columns in reckless daring against these bristling heights. When darkness drew its kindly veil over the scene, Lee's army had driven General Sickles from his chosen position to his second line of defense on the hill behind, gained a foothold in the famous Devil's Den at the base of the Round Tops, broken the lines of the Union right and held their fortifications on Culp's Hill.

The day had been one of frightful slaughter.

The Union losses in the two days had reached the appalling total of more than twenty thousand men. Lee had lost fifteen thousand.

The brilliant July moon rose and flooded this field of blood and death with silent glory. From every nook and corner, from every shadow and across every open space, through the hot breath of the night, came the moans of thousands, and louder than all the long agonizing cries for water. Many a man in grey crawled over the ragged rocks to press his canteen to the lips of his dying enemy in blue, and many a boy in blue did as much for the man in grey.

Fifteen thousand wounded men lay there through the long black hours.

At ten o'clock a wounded Christian soldier began to sing one of the old, sweet hymns of faith, whose words have come ringing down the ages wet with tears and winged with human hopes. In five minutes ten thousand voices of blue and grey, some of them quivering with the agony of death, had joined. For two hours the woods and hills rang with the songs of these wounded men.

All through this pitiful music the Confederates were massing their artillery on Seminary Ridge, replacing their wounded horses and refilling their ammunition chests.

The Union army were burrowing like moles and planting their terrible batteries on the brows of the hills beyond the town.

At Lee's council of war that night Longstreet advised his withdrawal from Gettysburg into a more favorable position in the mountains. But the Confederate Commander, reinforced now by the arrival of Pickett's division of fifteen thousand men and Stuart's cavalry, determined to renew the battle.

At the first grey streak of dawn on the 3rd the Federal guns roared their challenge to the Confederate forces which had captured their entrenchments on Culp's Hill. Seven terrible hours of bombardment, charge and counter charge followed until every foot of space had claimed its toll of dead, before the Confederates yielded the Hill.

At noon there was an ominous lull in the battle. At one o'clock a puff of smoke from Seminary Ridge was followed by a dull roar. The signal gun had pealed its call of death to thousands. For two miles along the crest of this Ridge the Confederates had planted one hundred and fifty guns. Two miles of smoke-wreathed flame suddenly leaped from those hills in a single fiery breath.

The longer line of big Federal guns on Seminary Ridge were silent for a few minutes and then answered gun for gun until the heavens were transformed into a roaring hell of bursting, screaming, flaming shells. For two hours the earth trembled beneath the shock of these volcanoes, and then the two storms died slowly away and the smoke began to lift.

An ominous sign. The grey infantry were deploying in line under Pickett to charge the heights of Cemetery Ridge. Fifteen thousand gallant men against an impregnable hill held by seventy thousand intrenched soldiers, backed by the deadliest and most powerful artillery.

They swept now into the field before the Heights, their bands playing as if on parade—their grey ranks dressed on their colors. Down the slope across the plain and up the hill the waves rolled, their thinning ranks closing the wide gaps torn each moment by the fiery sleet of iron and lead.

A handful of them lived to reach the Union lines on those heights. Armistead, with a hundred men, broke through and lifted his battle flag for a moment over a Federal battery, and fell mortally wounded.

And then the shattered grey wave broke into a spray of blood and slowly ebbed down the hill. The battle of Gettysburg had ended.

For the first time the blue Army of the Potomac had won a genuine victory. It had been gained at a frightful cost, but no price was too high to pay for such a victory. It had saved the Capital of the Nation. The Union army had lost twenty-three thousand men, the Confederate twenty thousand. Meade had lost seventeen of his generals, and Lee, fourteen.

When the thrilling news from the front reached Washington on July 4th, the President lifted his big hands above his head and cried to the crowd of excited men who thronged the Executive office:

"Unto God we give all the praise!"

None of those present knew the soul significance of that sentence as it fell from his trembling lips. He seated himself at his desk and quickly wrote a brief proclamation of thanks to Almighty God, which he telegraphed to the Governor of each Union State, requesting them to repeat it to their people.

While the North was still quivering with joy over the turn of the tide at Gettysburg, Gideon Welles, the Secretary of the Navy, hurried into the President's office and handed him a dispatch from the gunboat under Admiral Porter cooeperating with General Grant announcing the fall of Vicksburg, the surrender of thirty-five thousand Confederate soldiers of its garrison, and the opening of the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico.

The President seized his hat, his dark face shining with joy:

"I will telegraph the news to General Meade myself!"

He stopped suddenly and threw his long arms around Welles:

"What can we do for the Secretary of the Navy for this glorious intelligence? He is always giving us good news. I cannot tell you my joy over this result. It is great, Mr. Welles, it is great!"

With the eagerness of a boy he rushed to the telegraph office and sent the message to Meade over his own signature.

For the first time in dreary months the sun had burst for a moment through the clouds that had hung in endless gloom over the White House. The sorrowful eyes were shining with new hope. The President felt sure that General Lee could never succeed in leading his shattered army back into Virginia. He had lost twenty thousand men out of his sixty-two thousand—while Meade was still in command of a grand army of eighty-two thousand soldiers flushed with victory. The Potomac River was in flood and the Confederate army was on its banks unable to recross.

It was a moral certainty that the heroic Commander who had saved the Capital at Gettysburg could, with his eighty-two thousand men, capture or crush Lee's remaining force, caught in this trap by the swollen river, and end the war.

The men who crowded into the Executive office the day after the news of Vicksburg, found the Chief Magistrate in high spirits. Among the cases of deserters, court-martialed and ordered to be shot, he was surprised to find a negro soldier bearing the remarkable name of Julius Caesar Thornton. John Vaughan had telegraphed the President asking his interference with the execution of this cruel edict.

The President was deeply interested. It was the beginning of the use of negro troops. He had consented to their employment with reluctance, but they were proving their worth to the army, both in battle and in the work of garrisons.

Julius was brought from prison for an interview with the Chief Magistrate.

Stanton had sternly demanded the enforcement of the strictest military discipline as the only way to make these black troops of any real service to the Government. He asked that an example be made of Julius by sending him back to the army to be publicly shot before the assembled men of his race. He was convicted of two capital offenses. He had been caught in Washington shamelessly flaunting the uniform he had disgraced.

Julius faced the President with an humble salute and a broad grin. The black man liked the looks of his judge and he threw off all embarrassment his situation had produced with the first glance at the kindly eyes gazing at him over the rims of those spectacles.

"Well, Julius Caesar Thornton, this is a serious charge they have lodged against you?"

"Yassah, dat's what dey say."

"You went forth like a man to fight for your country, didn't you?"

"Na, sah!"

"How'd you get there?"

"Dey volunteered me, sah."

"Volunteered you, did they?" the President laughed.

"Yassah—dat dey did. Dey sho' volunteered me whether er no——"

"And how did it happen?"

"Dey done hit so quick, sah, I scacely know how dey did do hit. I was in de war down in Virginia wid Marse John Vaughan—an' er low-lifed Irishman on guard dar put me ter wuk er buryin' corpses. I hain't nebber had no taste for corpses nohow, an' I didn't like de job—mo' specially, sah, when one ob 'em come to ez I was pullin' him froo de dark ter de grave——"

"Come to, did he?" the President smiled.

"Yassah—he come to all of er sudden an' kicked me! An' hit scared me near 'bout ter death. I lit out fum dar purty quick, sah, an' go West. An' I ain't mor'n got out dar 'fore two fellers drawed dere muskets on me an' persuaded me ter volunteer, sah. Dey put dese here cloze on me an' tell me dat I wuz er hero. I tell 'em dey must be some mistake 'bout dat, but dey say no—dey know what dey wuz er doin'. Dey keep on tellin' me dat I wuz er hero an', by golly, I 'gin ter b'lieve hit myself till dey git me into trouble, sah."

"You were in a battle?"

Julius scratched his head and walled his eyes:

"I had er little taste ob it, sah,——"

"Well, you tried to fight, didn't you?"

"No, sah,—I run."

"Ran at the first fire?"

"Yas, sah! An' I'd a ran sooner ef I'd er known hit wuz comin'——"

Julius paused and broke into a jolly laugh:

"Dey git one pop at me, sah, 'fore I seed what dey wuz doin'!"

The President suppressed a laugh and gazed at Julius with severity:

"That wasn't very creditable to your courage."

"Dat ain't in my line, sah,—I'se er cook."

"Have you no regard for your reputation?"

"Dat ain't nuttin' ter me, sah, 'side er life!"

"And your life is worth more than other people's?"

"Worth er lot mo' ter me, sah."

"I'm afraid they wouldn't have missed you, Julius, if you'd been killed."

"Na, sah, but I'd a sho missed myself an' dat's de pint wid me."

The President fixed him with a comical frown:

"It's sweet and honorable to die for one's country, Julius!"

"Yassah—dat's what I hear—but I ain't fond er sweet things—I ain't nebber hab no taste fer 'em, sah!"

"Well, it looks like I'll have to let 'em have you, Julius, for an example. I've tried to save you—but there doesn't seem to be any thing to take hold of. Every time I grab you, you slip right through my fingers. I reckon they'll have to shoot you——"

The negro broke into a hearty laugh:

"G'way fum here, Mr. President! You can't fool me, sah. I sees yer laughin' right now way back dar in yo' eyes. You ain't gwine let 'em shoot me. I'se too vallable a nigger fer dat. I wuz worth er thousan' dollars 'fore de war. I sho' oughter be wuth two thousan' now. What's de use er 'stroyin' er good piece er property lak dat? I won't be no good ter nobody ef dey shoots me!"

The President broke down at last, leaned back in his chair and laughed with every muscle of his long body. Julius joined him with unction.

When the laughter died away the tall figure bent over his desk and wrote an order for the negro's release, and discharge from the army.

One of the things which had brought the President his deepest joy in the victory of Vicksburg was not the importance of the capture of the city and the opening of the Mississippi so much as the saving of U. S. Grant as a commanding General.

From the capture of Fort Donelson, the eyes of the Chief Magistrate had been fixed on this quiet fighter. And then came the disaster to his army at Shiloh—the first day's fight a bloody and overwhelming defeat—the second the recovery of the ground lost and the death of Albert Sydney Johnston, his brilliant Confederate opponent.

As a matter of fact, in its results, the battle had been a crushing disaster to the South. But Grant had lost fourteen thousand men in the two days' carnage and it was the first great field of death the war had produced. McClellan had not yet met Lee before Richmond. The cry against Grant was furious and practically universal.

Senator Winter, representing the demands of Congress, literally stormed the White House for weeks with the persistent and fierce demand for Grant's removal.

The President shook his head doggedly:

"I can't spare this man—he fights!"

The Senator submitted the proofs that Grant was addicted to the use of strong drink and that he was under the influence of whiskey on the first day of the battle of Shiloh.

In vain Winter stormed and threatened for an hour. The President was adamant.

He didn't know Grant personally. But he had felt the grip of his big personality on the men under his command and he refused to let him go.

He turned to his tormentor at last with a quizzical look in his eye:

"You know, Winter, that reminds me of a little story——"

The Senator threw up both hands with a gesture of rage. He knew what the wily diplomat was up to.

"I won't hear it, sir," he growled. "I won't hear it. You and your stories are sending this country to hell—it's not more than a mile from there now!"

The sombre eyes smiled as he slowly said:

"I believe it is just a mile from here to the Senate Chamber!"

The Senator faced him a moment and the two men looked at each other tense, erect, unyielding.

"There may or may not be a grain of truth in your statements, Winter," the quiet voice continued, "but your personal animus against Grant is deeper. He is a Democrat married to a Southern woman, and is a slave-holder. You can't be fair to him. I can, I must and I will. I am the President of all the people. The Nation needs this man. I will not allow him to be crushed. You have my last word."

The Senator strode to the door in silence and paused:

"But you haven't mine, sir!"

The tall figure bowed and smiled.

The President found the task a greater one than he had dreamed. So furious was the popular outcry against Grant, so dogged and persistent was the demand for his removal he was compelled to place General Halleck in nominal command of the district in which his army was operating until the popular furor should subside. In this way he had kept Grant as Second in Command at the head of his army, and Vicksburg with thirty-five thousand prisoners was the answer the silent man in the West had sent to his champion and protector in the White House.

The thrilling message had come at an opportune moment. The new commander of the army of the Potomac had defeated General Lee at Gettysburg and for an hour his name was on every lip. The President and the Nation had taken it for granted that he would hurl his eighty-two thousand men on Lee's army hemmed in by the impassable Potomac.

So sure of this was Stanton that he declared to the President:

"If a single regiment of Lee's army ever gets back into Virginia in an organized condition it will prove that I am totally unfit to be Secretary of War."

Once more the impossible happened. Lee did get back into Virginia, his army marching with quick step and undaunted spirit, ready to fight at any moment his rear guard came in touch with Meade's advancing hosts. He not only crossed the Potomac with his army in perfect fighting form with every gun he carried, but with thousands of fat cattle and four thousand prisoners of war captured on the field of Gettysburg.

The President's day of rejoicing was brief. As Lee withdrew to his old battle ground with his still unconquered lines of grey, the man in the White House saw with aching heart his dream of peace fade into the mists of even a darker night than the one through which his soul had just passed.

Slowly but surely the desperate South began to recover from the shock of Gettysburg and Vicksburg and filled once more her thinning battle lines. General Lee, sorely dissatisfied with himself for his failure to win in Pennsylvania, tendered his resignation to the Richmond Government, asking to be relieved by a younger and abler man. As no such man lived, Jefferson Davis declined his resignation, and he continued his leadership with renewed faith in his genius by every man, woman and child in the South.

General Meade, stung to desperation by the bitter disappointment of the President and the people of the North, also tendered his resignation.

For the moment the President refused to consider it, though his eyes were fixed with growing faith on the silent figure of Grant. One more victory from this stolid fighter and he had found the great commander for which he had sought in vain through blood and tears for more than two years.

The first task to which he must turn his immediate attention was the filling of the depleted ranks of the Northern armies. Volunteering had ceased, the terms of the enlisted men would soon expire, and it was absolutely necessary to enforce a draft for five hundred thousand soldiers.

The President had been warned by the Democratic Party, at present a powerful and aggressive minority in Congress, that such an act of despotism would not be tolerated by a free people.

The President's answer was simple and to the point:

"The South has long since adopted force to fill her ranks. If we are to continue this war and save the Union it is absolutely necessary, and therefore it shall be done."

The great city of New York was the danger point. The Government had been warned of the possibility of a revolution in the metropolis, whose representatives in Congress had demanded the right to secede in the beginning of the war. And yet the warning had not been taken seriously by the War Department. No effort had been made to garrison the city against the possibility of an armed uprising to resist the draft. Demagogues had been haranguing the people for months, inflaming their minds to the point of madness on the subject of this draft.

On the night before the drawing was ordered in New York the leading speaker had swept the crowd off their feet by the daring words with which he closed his appeal:

"We will resist this attempt of Black Republicans and Abolitionists to force the children of the poor into the ranks they dare not enter. Will you give any more of your sons to be food for vultures on the hills of Virginia? Will you allow them to be torn from your firesides and driven as dumb cattle into the mouths of Southern cannon? If you are slaves, yes,——if you are freemen, no!"

When the lottery wheel began to turn off its fatal names at the Government Draft Office at the corner of Forty-sixth Street and Third Avenue on the morning of July 14th, a sullen, determined mob packed the streets in front of the building. Among them stood hundreds of women whose husbands, sons and brothers were listed on the spinning wheel of black fortune.

Their voices were higher and angrier than the men's:

"This is a rich man's war—but a poor man's fight——"

"Yes, if you've got three hundred dollars you can hire a substitute from the slums——"

"But if you happen to be a working man, you can stand up and be shot for these cowards and sneaks!"

"Down with the draft!"

"To hell with the hirelings and their wheel!"

"Smash it——"

"Burn the building!"

A tough from the East Side waved his hand to the crowd of frenzied men and women:

"Come on, boys,——"

With a single mighty impulse the mob surged toward the doors, and through them. A sound of smashing glass, blows, curses. A man rushed into the street holding the enrollment books above his head:

"Here are your names, men—the list of white slaves!"

The mob tore the sheets from his grasp and fell on them like hungry wolves. In ten minutes the books were only scraps of paper trampled into the filth of Third Avenue. Wherever a piece could be seen men and women stamped and spit on it.

They smashed the wheel and furniture into kindling wood, piled it in the middle of the room and set fire to it. No policemen or firemen were allowed to approach. Every officer of the law, both civil and military, had been chased and beaten and disappeared.

Half the block was in flames before the firemen could break through and reach the burning buildings.

Down the Avenue, the maddened mob swept with resistless impulse, jelling, cursing, shouting its defiance.

"Down with the Abolitionists!"

"Hang Horace Greeley on a sour apple tree!"

"To the Tribune Office!"

Howard, a reporter of the Tribune, was recognized:

"Kill him!"

"Hang him!"

The mob seized the reporter, dragged him to a lamp post and were about to put the rope around his neck when a blow from a cobblestone felled him to the sidewalk, the blood trickling down his neck.

A man bending over his body, shouted to the crowd:

"He's dead—we'll take the body away!"

A friend helped and they carried him into a store and saved his life.

For three days and nights this mob burned and killed at will and fought every officer of the law until the streets ran red with blood. They burned the Negro Orphan Asylum, beat, killed or hanged every negro who showed his face, sacked the home of Mayor Opdyke, at 79 Fifth Avenue, and attempted to burn it. They smashed in the Tribune building, gutted part of it and would have reduced it to ashes but for the brave defense put up by some of its men.

On the third day the announcement was made that the draft was suspended. Five thousand troops reached the city and partly succeeded in restoring order.

More than a thousand men had been killed and three thousand wounded—among them many women.

The Democratic papers now boldly demanded that the draft should be officially suspended until its constitutionality could be tested by the courts. The State and Municipal authorities of New York appealed to the President to suspend the draft.

He answered:

"If I suspend the draft there can be no army to continue the war and the days of the Republic are numbered. The life of the Nation is at stake."

They begged for time, and he hesitated for a day. The victories of Gettysburg and Vicksburg were forgotten in the grim shadow of a possible repetition of the French Revolution on a vast scale throughout the North. The mob had already sacked the office of the Times in Troy, broken out in Boston, and threatened Cincinnati.

The President gave the Governor of New York his final answer by sending an army of ten thousand veterans into the city. He planted his artillery to sweep the streets with grape and cannister, and ordered the draft to be immediately enforced.

The new wheel was set up, and turned with bayonets. The mobs were overawed and the ranks of the army were refilled.



CHAPTER XXXI

BETWEEN THE LINES

Betty Winter found to her sorrow that the memory of a dead love could be a troublesome thing. Ned Vaughan's tender and compelling passion had been resistless in the moonlight beneath a fragrant apple tree with the old mill wheel splashing its music at their feet. She had returned to her cot in the hospital that night in a glow of quiet, peaceful joy. Life's problem had been solved at last in the sweet peace of a tender and beautiful spiritual love—the only love that could be real.

All this was plain, while the glow of Ned's words were in her heart and the memory of his nearness alive in the fingers and lips he had kissed. And then to her terror came stealing back the torturing vision of his brother. Why, why, why could she never shut out the memory of this man!

Over and over again she repeated the angry final word:

"He isn't worth a moment's thought!"

And yet she kept on thinking, thinking, always in the same blind circle. At last came the new resolution,

"Worthy or unworthy, I've given my word to a better man and that settles it."

The fight had become in her inflamed imagination the struggle between good and evil. The younger man with his chivalrous boyish ideals was God, Love, Light. The older with his iron will, his fierce ungovernable passion, was the Devil, Lust and Darkness. She trembled with new terror at the discovery that there was something elemental deep within her own life that answered the challenge of this older voice with a strange joyous daring.

She had just risen from her knees where she had prayed for strength to fight and win this battle when the maid knocked on her door. She had left the hospital and returned home for a week's rest, tottering on the verge of a nervous collapse since her return from the meeting with Ned.

"A letter, Miss Betty," the maid said with a smile.

She tore the envelope with nervous dread. It bore no postmark and was addressed in a strange hand.

Inside was another envelope in Ned's handwriting, and around it a sheet of paper on which was scrawled,

"DEAR MISS WINTER: The bearer of this letter is a trusted spy of both Governments. I have friends in Washington and in Richmond. In Richmond I am supposed to betray the Washington Government. In Washington it is known that I am at heart loyal to the Union, and all my correspondence from Richmond to the Confederate agents in Canada and the North I deliver to the President and Stanton. This one is an exception. I happened to have met Mr. Ned. Vaughan and like him. I deliver this letter to you unopened by any hand. I've a sweetheart myself."

With a cry of joy, Betty broke the seal and read Ned's message. It was written just after the battle of Gettysburg.

"DEAREST: I am writing to you to-night because I must—though this may never reach you. The whole look of war has changed for me since that wonderful hour we spent in the moonlight beside the river and you promised me your life. It's all a pitiful tragedy now, and love, love, love seems the only thing in all God's universe worth while! I don't wish to kill any more. It hurts the big something inside that's divine. I'm surprised at myself that I can't see the issues of National life as I saw them at first. Somehow they have become dwarfed beside the new wonder and glory that fills my heart. And now like a poor traitor, I am praying for peace, peace at any price. Oh, dearest, you have brought me to this. I love you so utterly with every breath I breathe, every thought of mind and every impulse of soul and body, how can I see aught else in the world?

"In every scene of these three days of horror through which we've just passed, my thought was of you. The signal gun that called the men to die boomed your name for me. I heard it in the din and roar and crash of armies. The louder came the call of death, the sweeter life seemed because life meant you. Life has taken on a new and wonderful meaning. I love it as I never loved it before and I've grown to hate death and I whisper it to you, my love, my own—to hate war! I want to live now, and I'm praying, praying, praying for peace. My mind is yet clear in its conviction of right or I could not stay here a moment longer. But I'm longing and hoping and wondering whether God will not show us the way out of your tragic dilemma.

"During the battle I found a handsome young Federal officer who had fallen inside out lines. With his last strength he was trying to write a message to his bride who was waiting for him behind the Union lines. I couldn't pass by. I stopped and got his name, gave him water and made him as comfortable as possible. I got permission from my General while the battle raged and sent his message with a flag of truce to his wife. She came flying to his side at the risk of her life, got to the rear and saved him. Perhaps I wasn't an ideal soldier in that pause in my fight. But I had to do it, dearest. It was your sweet spirit that stopped me and sent the white flag of love and mercy.

"And the strangest of all the things of the war happened that night. I spent six hours among the wounded, helping the poor boys all I could—both blue and grey—and I suddenly ran into John at the same pitiful work. It's curious how all the bitterness is gone out of my heart.

"I grabbed him and hugged him, and we both cried like two fools. We sat down between the lines in the brilliant moonlight and talked for an hour. I told him of you, dearest, and he wished me all the happiness life could give, but with a queer hitch in his voice, and after a long silence, which made me wonder if he, too, had not been loving you in secret. I shouldn't wonder if every man who sees you loves you. The wonder to me is they don't.

"Our band is playing an old-fashioned Southern song that sets my heart to beating with joyous madness again. I'm dreaming through that song of the home I'm going to build for you somewhere in the land of sunshine. Don't worry about me. I'm not going to die. I know I'm immortal now. I had faith once. Now I know—because I love you and time is too short to tell and all too short to live my love.

"NED."

She read it over twice through eyes that grew dim with each foolish, sweet extravagance. And then she went back and read for the third time the line about John, threw herself across her bed and burst into tears.



CHAPTER XXXII

THE WHIRLWIND

The draft of half a million men was scarcely completed when Rosecrans' Western army, advancing into Georgia, met with crushing defeat at Chickamauga, "The River of Death." His shattered hosts were driven back into Chattanooga with the loss of eighteen thousand men in a rout so complete and stunning that Charles A. Dana, the Assistant Secretary of War, telegraphed the President from the front that it was another "Bull Run."

Rosecrans himself wired that he had met with a terrible disaster. The White House sent him words of cheer. The Confederate Commander, General Bragg, rapidly closed in and began to lay siege to Chattanooga, and the defeated Federal army were put on short rations.

The President turned his eyes now from Meade and his army of the Potomac which Lee's strategy had completely baffled and gave his first thought to the armies of the West. He sent Sherman hurrying from the Mississippi to Rosecrans' relief and Hooker from the East. In the place of Rosecrans he promoted George H. Thomas, whose gallant stand had saved the army from annihilation and won the title, "The Rock of Chickamauga." And most important of all he placed in supreme command of the forces in Tennessee the silent man whom his patience and faith had saved to the Nation, the conqueror of Vicksburg—Ulysses S. Grant.

On November the 24th and 25th, the new Commander raised the siege of Chattanooga, and drove Bragg's army from Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain back into Georgia.

At last the President had found the man of genius for whom he had long searched. Grant was summoned to Washington and given command of all the armies of the United States East and West.

The new General at once placed William Tecumseh Sherman at the head of an army of a hundred thousand men at Chattanooga for the purpose of reinvading Georgia, sent General Butler with forty thousand up the Peninsula against Richmond along the line of McClellan's old march, raised the Army of the Potomac to one hundred and forty thousand effective fighters, took command in person and faced General Lee on the banks of the Rapidan but a few miles from the old ground in the Wilderness around Chancellorsville where Hooker's men had baptized the earth in heroic blood the year before.

Grant's army was the flower of Northern manhood and with its three hundred and eighteen great field guns the best equipped body of fighting men ever brought together on our continent. His baggage train was over sixty miles long and would have stretched the entire distance to Richmond.

By the spring of 1864 when he reached the Rapidan Lee's army had been recruited again to its normal strength of sixty-two thousand.

A great religious revival swept the Southern camps during the winter and its meetings lasted into the spring almost to the hour of the opening guns of the Wilderness campaign. Had whispers from the Infinite reached the souls of the ragged men in grey and told them of coming Gethsemane and Calvary?

Certain it is that though Lee's army were ragged and poorly fed their courage was never higher, their faith in their Commander never more sublime than in those beautiful spring mornings in April when they burnished their bayonets to receive Grant's overwhelming host.

The Chaplain of Ned Vaughan's regiment was leading a prayer meeting in the moonlight. An earnest brother was praying fervently for more manhood, and more courage.

A ragged Confederate kneeling nearby didn't like the drift of his petition and his patience gave out. He raised his head and called.

"Say, hold on there, brother! You're getting that prayer all wrong. We don't need no more courage—got so much now we're skeered of ourselves sometimes. What we need is provisions. Ask the Lord to send us something to eat. That's what we want now——"

The leader took the interruption in good spirit and added an eloquent request for at least one good meal a day if the Lord in his goodness and mercy could spare it.

No persimmon tree was ever stripped without the repetition of their old joke. They all knew the words by heart,

"Don't eat those persimmons—they're not good for you!"

"I know it, man, I'm just doin' it to pucker my stomach to fit my rations!"

Ned was passing the door of a cabin in which a prayer meeting of officers was being held. He was walking with his Colonel who was fond of a sip of corn whiskey at times. He was slightly deaf.

The leader of the meeting called from the door:

"Won't you join us in prayer, Colonel?"

"Thank you, no, I've just had a little!" he answered innocently.

Ned roared and the brethren inside the cabin joined the laugh.

No body of men of any race ever marched to death with calmer faith than those ragged lines of grey now girding their loins for the fiercest, bloodiest struggle in the annals of the world.

Lee allowed Grant to cross the Rapidan unopposed and penetrate the tangled wilds of the Wilderness. The Southerner knew that in these dense woods the effectiveness of his opponent's superior numbers would be vastly reduced. Longstreet's corps had not yet arrived from Gordonsville where he had been sent to obtain food, and he must concentrate his forces.

The days were oppressively hot, as the men in blue tramped through the forest aisles of the vast Virginia jungle—a maze of trees, underbrush and dense foliage. A pall of ominous silence hung over this labyrinth of desolation, broken only by the chirp of bluebird or the distant call of the yellowhammer.

Not waiting for the arrival of Longstreet on his forced march from Gordonsville, Lee suddenly threw the half of his army on Grant's advancing men with savage energy. Their march was halted and through every hour of the day and far into the night the fierce conflict raged. As darkness fell the Confederates had pushed the blue lines back, captured four guns and a number of prisoners.

But Longstreet had not come and Lee's army of barely forty thousand men were in a dangerous position before Grant's legions.

Both Generals renewed the fight at daylight. The Federals attacked Lee's entire line with terrific force. Just as the Confederate right wing was being crushed and rolled back in disorder, Longstreet reached the field and threw his men into the breach. Lee himself rode to the front to lead the charge and reestablish his yielding lines.

From a thousand throats rose the cry:

"Lee to the rear!"

"Go back, General Lee!"

"This is no place for you!"

"We'll settle this!"

The men refused to move until their Commander had withdrawn. And then with their fierce yell they charged and swept the field.

Lee repeated the brilliant achievement of Jackson at Chancellorsville. Longstreet was sent around Hancock's left to turn and assail his flank. The movement was a complete success. Hancock's line was smashed and driven back a mile to his second defenses.

General Wadsworth at the head of his division was mortally wounded and fell into the hands of the on-sweeping Confederates. Just as the movement had reached the moments of its triumph which would have crumpled Grant's army in confusion back on the banks of the river, Longstreet fell dangerously wounded, struck down by a volley from his own men in exactly the same way and almost in the same spot where Jackson had fallen. General Jenkins, who was with him, was instantly killed.

The charging hosts were halted by the change of Commanders and the movement failed of its big purpose, though at sunset General John B. Gordon broke through Sedgwick's Union lines, rolled back his right flank, drove him a mile from his entrenchments and captured six hundred prisoners with two brigadier generals.

The mysterious fate which had pursued the South had once more stricken down a great commander in the moment of victory, and snatched it from his grasp—at Shiloh, Albert Sydney Johnston; at Seven Pines, Joseph E. Johnston; at Chancellorsville, Jackson, and now Longstreet.

Grant in two days lost seventeen thousand six hundred and sixty-six men, a larger number than fell under Hooker when he had retreated in despair. Any other General than Grant, the stolid bulldog fighter, would have retreated across the Rapidan to reorganize his bleeding lines.

As one of his Generals rode up the following morning out of the confusion and horror of the night, Grant, chewing on his cigar, waved his right arm with a quick movement:

"It's all right, Wilson; we'll fight again!"

Next day the two armies lay in their trenches facing each other in grim silence. Grant determined again to turn Lee's right flank and get between him and Richmond.

Lee divined his purpose before a single regiment had begun to march. Spottsylvania Court House lay on his right. The Confederate Commander hurried his advance guard to the spot and lay in wait for his opponent.

The day of the 19th was spent by both armies in adjusting lines and constructing breastworks. These fortifications were made by digging huge ditches and on the top of their banks fastening heavy logs. In front of these, abatis were made by filling the trees and cutting their limbs in such a way that the sharp spikes projected toward the breasts of the advancing foe.

While placing his guns in position General Sedgwick was killed by a sharpshooter's bullet—a commander of high character and fearless courage and loved by every man in his army.

On the morning of the 10th Hancock attempted to turn Lee's rear by crossing the Po. The movement failed and he was recalled with heavy losses under Early's assault as he recrossed the river.

Warren led his division in a determined charge on the Confederate front and they were mowed down in hundreds by Longstreet's men behind their entrenchments. They reached the abatis and one man leaped on the breastworks before they fell back in bloody confusion. General Rice was mortally wounded in this charge.

On the left of Warren, Colonel Emory Upton charged and broke through the Confederate lines capturing twelve hundred prisoners, but was driven back at last with the loss of a thousand of his men. Grant made him a Brigadier General on the field.

The first day at Spottsylvania ended with a loss of four thousand Union men. Lee's losses were less than half that number.

The 11th they paused for breath, and Grant sent his famous dispatch to Washington:

"I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer."

On the morning of the 12th Hancock was ordered to charge at daylight. Lee's lines were spread out in the shape of an enormous letter V. Hancock's task was to capture the angle which formed the key to this position.

In pitch darkness under pouring rain his four divisions under Birney, Mott, Barlow and Gibbon slipped through the mud and crept into position within a few hundred yards of the Confederate breastworks.

As the first streaks of dawn pierced the murky clouds, without a shot, the solid, silent lines of blue rushed this angle and leaped into the entrenchments before the astounded men in grey knew what had happened.

So swift was the blow, so surprising, so overwhelming in numbers, the angle was captured practically without a struggle and the three thousand men within it were forced to surrender with every cannon, their muskets, colors and two Generals. It was the most brilliant single achievement of "Hancock the Superb."

Pressing on, Hancock's men advanced against the second series of trenches a half mile beyond. Here the fight really began.

Into their faces poured a terrific volley of musketry and General John B. Gordon led his men in a desperate charge to drive the invaders back.

Lee, seeing the dangerous situation, rode to the front with the evident intention of joining in this charge.

Again the cry rang from the hearts of the men who loved him:

"Lee to the rear!"

They refused to move until he was led out of range of the fire. Gordon's men charged and drove the Federal hosts back until at last they stood against the entrenchments they had captured. Reinforcements now poured in from both sides and the fighting became indescribable in its mad desperation. Thousands of men in blue and men in grey fought face to face and hand to hand. Muskets blazed in one another's eyes and blew heads off. The dead were piled in rows four and five deep, blue and grey locked in each other's arms. The trenches were filled with the dead and cleared of bodies again and again to make room for the living until they in turn were thrown out.

Ned Vaughan saw a grey color-bearer's arm shot away at the shoulder, the quivering flesh smeared with mud, stained with powder and filled with the shreds of his grey sleeve—and yet, without blenching, he grasped his colors with the other hand and swept on into the jaws of this flaming hell at the head of his men. The rain of musketry fire against the trees came to Ned's ears in low undertone like the rattle of myriads of hail stones on the roof of a house.

A grey soldier was fighting a duel to the death with a magnificently dressed officer in blue, bare bayonet against bare sword. The soldier, with a sudden plunge, ran his opponent through. With a shudder, Ned looked to see if it were John.

A company of men in blue were caught and cut off by a grey wave and were trying to surrender. Their officers with drawn revolvers refused to let them.

"Shoot your officers!" a grey man shouted. In a moment every Commander dropped and the men were marched to the rear.

Hour after hour the flames of hell swirled in an endless whirlwind around this "Bloody Angle." Battle line after battle line rushed in never to return. Ned saw an oak tree two feet in diameter gnawed down by musket balls. It fell with a crash, killing and wounding a number of men.

Color-bearers waved their flags in each other's faces, clinched and fought like demons. Two soldiers, their ammunition spent, choked each other to death on top of the entrenchment and rolled down its banks among the torn and mangled bodies that filled the ditch.

In the edge of this red whirlwind Ned Vaughan saw a grim man in grey standing beside a tree using two guns. His wounded comrade loaded one while he took deliberate aim and fired the other. With each crack of his musket a man in blue was falling.

In the centre of this mass of struggling maniacs the men were fighting with gun swabs, handspikes, clubbed muskets, stones and fists.

The night brought no rest, no pause to succor the wounded or bury the dead. Through the black murk of the darkness they fought on and on until at last the men who were living sank in their tracks at three o'clock before day and neither line had given from this "Bloody Angle."

The rain ceased to fall, the clouds lifted and the waning moon came out.

Ned Vaughan passing over the outer field saw a long line of men lying in regular ranks in an odd position. He turned to the Commander.

"Why don't you move that line of battle now to make it conform to your own?"

"They're all dead men," was the quiet answer. "They are Georgia soldiers."

John Vaughan, on the other side, crossing an open space, came on a blue battle line asleep rank on rank, skirmishers in front and battle line behind, all asleep on their arms. There was no one near to answer a question. They were all dead.

The blue and grey men were talking to one another now.

"Well, Johnnie," a Yankee called through the shadows, "I can't admit that you're inspired of God, but after to-day I must say that you are possessed of the devil."

"Same to you, Yank! Your papers say we're all demoralized anyhow—so to-morrow you oughtn't have no trouble finishin' us!"

"Ah, shut up now, Johnnie, and go to sleep!"

"All right, good-night, Yank, hope ye'll rest well. We'll give ye hell at daylight!"

For five days Grant swung his blue lines in circles of blood trying in vain to break Lee's ranks and gave it up. He had lost at Spottsylvania eighteen thousand more men. The stolid, silent man of iron nerves was terribly moved by the frightful losses his gallant army had sustained. He watched with anguish the endless lines of wagons bearing his stricken men from the field. Lee's forces had been handled with such consummate and terrible skill, his crushing numbers had made little impression.

Grant was facing a new force in the world. The ordinary methods of war which he had used with success in the West went here for nothing. The devotion of Lee's men was a mania. Small as his army was the bulldog fighter saw with amazement that it was practically unconquerable in a square, hand-to-hand struggle.

Once more he was forced to maneuver for advantage in position. He ordered a new flank movement by the North Anna River.

He had opened his fight with Lee on the 5th, and in two weeks he had lost thirty-six thousand men, without gaining an inch in the execution of his original plan of thrusting himself between the Confederate leader and his Capital. Lee's army was apparently as terrible a fighting machine as on the day they had met.

A truce now followed to bury the dead and care for the wounded. So sure had Grant been of crushing his opponent he had refused to agree to this during the struggle.