“Lordy! I tell you we gave it ter 'em!” exclaimed another in excited jerks. “Fight! Wall, that's what I call fightin', leastways it's put. I declar' I reckon I hit six Yankees plum on the head with the butt of this here musket.”
He paused to knock the head off a champagne bottle, and lifting the broken neck to his lips drained the foaming wine, which spilled in white froth upon his clothes. His face was red in the firelight, and when he spoke his words rolled like marbles from his tongue. Dan, looking at him, felt a curious conviction that the man had not gone near enough to the guns to smell the powder.
“Wall, it may be so, but I ain't seed you,” returned the first speaker, contemptuously, as he stroked his bandage. “I was thar all day and I ain't seed you raise no special dust.”
“Oh, I ain't claimin' nothin' special,” put in the other, discomfited.
“Six is a good many, I reckon,” drawled the wounded man, reflectively, “and I ain't sayin' I settled six on 'em hand to hand—I ain't sayin' that.” He spoke with conscious modesty, as if the smallness of his assertion was equalled only by the greatness of his achievements. “I ain't sayin' I settled more'n three on 'em, I reckon.”
Dan left the group and went on slowly across the field, now and then stumbling upon a sleeper who lay prone upon the trodden clover, obscured by the heavy dusk. The mass of the army was still somewhere on the long road—only the exhausted, the sickened, or the unambitious drifted back to fall asleep upon the uncovered ground.
As Dan crossed the meadow he drew near to a knot of men from a Kentucky regiment, gathered in the light of a small wood fire, and recognizing one of them, he stopped to inquire for news of his missing friends.
“Oh, you wouldn't know your sweetheart on a night like this,” replied the man he knew—a big handsome fellow, with a peculiar richness of voice. “Find a hole, Montjoy, and go to sleep in it, that's my advice. Were you much cut up?”
“I don't know,” answered Dan, uneasily. “I'm trying to make sure that we were not. I lost the others somewhere on the road—a horse knocked me down.”
“Well, if this is to be the last battle, I shouldn't mind a scratch myself,” put in a voice from the darkness, “even if it's nothing more than a bruise from a horse's hoof. By the bye, Montjoy, did you see the way Stuart rode down the Zouaves? I declare the slope looked like a field of poppies in full bloom. Your cousin was in that charge, I believe, and he came out whole. I saw him afterwards.”