"And you can guide us right to the spot?"
"Ye-as, suh. Certain, suh."
The general turns sharply on his senior aide. "There's not a moment to be lost. What a pity we have no cavalry! Ride straight to Colonel Connor. Tell him to rouse his regiment instantly and without a sound. Leave knapsacks and blankets in camp. Guide them here as quick as you can. Now, captain, this boy must have a rousing supper. He deserves it."
CHAPTER XXIII.
And now if there is a boy reader of this story who doesn't say it is high time he is told what had become of Snipe Lawton, then the narrator never knew a thing about boys. Leaving Shorty to sleep over his injured dignity and lose another of the opportunities of his life, we will turn back the page and look again over the stirring fields thirty miles to the south. As neither Snipe nor his major nor his friend Keating, of the Zouaves, had been recognized among the dead, as they were not apparently among the prisoners, and as they certainly had not reappeared among their comrades along the Potomac, they must be looked for where last seen, close to that old brick and stone Virginia homestead, bowered in the midst of vines and fruit-trees, known as the Henry house.
Not until weeks after—long, weary, perilous weeks—was the story told, and then Snipe was not the narrator. The grave, taciturn major waxed eloquent and even diffuse for once in his life, and the burden of his song was Snipe and Sergeant Keating.
After their second brave advance along the plateau the New-Englanders found themselves unsupported on both flanks, and their men falling from the hot fire that poured in from almost every direction. The old colonel hung on to the last, but saw that to save his regiment he must withdraw, and so gave the order. They fell back fighting, closing to the centre, and only once was there anything like confusion, and that occurred close to the Henry house, when some other regiment that had suddenly marched up the slope to the west almost as suddenly broke and came surging over the right companies, carrying two of them in the rush. It was while staying this disorder that Major Stark was suddenly dashed to earth. His horse, disembowelled by a whirring fragment of shell, reared and plunged violently, falling on his rider and crushing him in his frantic agony. Almost wild with grief and excitement, Snipe sprang from his saddle and ran to the major's aid, even though a dozen gray-clad fellows came bounding at them through the smoke. "I declare," he said, afterwards, "I thought they were coming to help me. They did help,—three or four of them. They pulled that poor horse off just as we've seen a crowd pull a fallen horse out of a tangle on Broadway, and they lifted the major up and stood him on one leg, and one of 'em gave him a drink from his canteen, and another, a boy like myself, actually began brushing him off. Everybody was so crazy with yelling and shouting that for a minute they didn't seem to realize the situation."