She understood.
“I’ll—I’ll make it up to you, Jim!” she whispered tremulously. “All of it, dear man. All the horrid lonely years, and everything. I promise.”
Another divine silence, broken only by the mocking-bird among the treetops.
“Emily,” he said, “the tide is going to turn in this war. The next move will be the turning-point. And it’ll turn hard. I’ll be in the thickest of it, dear.
“But I’ve got a kind of feeling that I’ll get through it safe. Because your love will be taking me through it. And after that—”
“I’ll be waiting, Jim,” she said.
CHAPTER XXXIII
WAR!
ALL day, along the steep banks of Antietam Creek, the battle had roared and bellowed and done its wholesale murdering.
All day, that red 17th of September, 1862—“the bloodiest single day’s fighting of the Civil War”—the Army of the Potomac had flung itself in dogged fury upon the V-shaped position of the Confederates on the creek’s farther side.
It was the second day of the battle of Antietam; the first day having been consumed in a more or less ineffectual artillery duel, and in maneuvering for positions of strategic advantage.