The man who shoots from behind a tree is as terrible as fate—so long as he remains behind his tree and his opponent is in the open. Once routed out of his shelter, he is but a mortal.
And these erstwhile terrifying Confederates, seen now at close range, were mere humans—and humans who were on the ragged edge of retreat.
Jimmie, drum slung momentarily behind him, had gone through the thicket like a woodchuck. He struck the fence, taller than his own head, and swarmed up its irregular side.
As he reached the top Dad vaulted the barrier and gained the far side, turning to help the boy down. Just then the charging men who followed them collided with the fence, and it went to matchwood under their rush.
Jimmie was sent sprawling through the air, and landed breathless against the bole of a live-oak. Dad lifted the gasping boy to his feet.
Not noticing who had done him this service, nor indeed that it had been done, Jimmie with a single gesture twisted the drum forward, and, running at full speed to regain his lead over the others, set the drum-sticks flying with unimpaired ardor to their noisy task again.
But in the inferno of noise, here among the roaring big guns, where the hand-to-hand fighting was, and where the arching foliage acted as a sounding-board, the drum’s babel went almost unheard.
Its work was done. The fire it had kindled needed now no fuel.
Dad still close at his side, Jimmie plunged on through the biting smoke-whirl. Out of the blinding reek just in front towered a Virginia rifleman, stripped to the waist, his rifle clubbed.
Glimpsing the blue of Jimmie’s uniform, the man aimed his clubbed gun for the lad’s head, doubtless ignorant in that haze and confusion that it was a boy and not a man at whom he smote.