No word did either of the two speak to the other—there was no space for words—and Jimmie had not so much as seen his grandfather. Yet Dad, after that one gasp of recognition, had pressed as close as possible to the lad and, in a daze of dread and incredulous delight, was charging shoulder to shoulder with him.
The Federals crashed pell-mell into the forest edge. There was a long minute of turmoil, of blind hand-to-hand fighting with gray-clad foes, who had all at once for the first time become visible.
Behind the first thick line of chinkapin and hazel underbrush at the forest fringe twisted a somewhat rotted, but still formidable, snake-fence. Behind this excellent double barrier—the tree foliage dropping to beneath the tops of the bushes—were three howitzer batteries and a number of detached pieces of light artillery.
This armament was reënforced by one of the new-fangled “mountain batteries” and a vast, unwieldy swivel-gun (part of the Norfolk navy-yard loot).
Apart from the guns and their crews, a scant two thousand Confederate infantrymen, chiefly made up of such marksmen as at that day were found only south of the Mason-Dixon line, comprised the forest defense.
By the well-established tactical rule that “one man may defend what four men cannot storm,” the odds were comfortably in the Southerners’ favor. These odds and their own invisibility had rendered their flank attack on the Federal demi-corps an all but absolute success.
But for the unforeseen effect that one red-haired child had had upon the charging-line, the Federals would even now have been reeling back upon their main body and helping still further to render that body helpless against the impending attack from the larger Confederate force that had not yet breasted the hill. As it was—
Through natural hedge and through rotting snake-fence crashed the charging Yankees. In a shouting, laughing, cheering mass they flung themselves, bayoneted guns leveled, upon their gray foes.
All at once the wood that had been so murderously easy for the Confederates to hold against their charging enemies grew too hot to contain them.
Back against the batteries the infantrymen were driven. Around the guns—and chiefly around the giant swivel—swirled the fight in tangled blue-gray eddies.