"They aimed toward that clump of trees, a mile away. They marched with steady step, as though they were on dress parade. When they were half way across the Union guns began to fire. They was torn apart; the rebel comrades stepped over the dead and went on through the storm of deadly measles as though it was rain and wind. When they started they was fifteen thousand; when they got back they was eight. They was almost annihilated. You could walk from the stone wall to beyond the Emmitsburg road without treading on the ground, the bodies lay so thick. Pickett and his men had done their best."
"Well done!" cried Brant, when he was through. "Now, that'll do. We want to talk. Just tell us when we get to the next important place."
They drove on down the wide avenue. Spring had been late, and there were lingering blossoms of dogwood and Judas-tree. Here and there a scarlet tanager flashed among the leaves; rabbits looked brightly at them from the wayside, and deep in the woods resounded the limpid note of a wood-robin.
Disobedient to Brant's command, Daggett was still talking, repeating to himself all the true and false statements of his old speeches. Some, indeed, were mad absurdities.
"There's only one Confederate monument on the field," he said. "You can tell it when we get there. It says 'C. S. A.' on it—'Secesh Soldiers of America.'
"There was great fightin' round Spangler's Spring," he went on soberly. "There those that had no legs gave water to those that had no arms, and those that had no arms carried off those that had no legs."
At the summit of Little Round Top the old horse stopped again.
"You see before you the important strategic points of the second day's fight—Devil's Den, the Wheat-Field, the Valley of Death. Yonder—"
Suddenly the old man's memory seemed to fail. He whispered incoherently, then he asked them if they wanted to get out.
"No," said Brant.