As quickly as the brain is advertised of an insect’s sting, so quickly did Aladdin recognize the voice and know that his brother. Jack was calling to him. He turned, and saw a little freckled boy, in a uniform much too big for him, trailing a large musket.
“Jack!” he cried, and rushed toward him with outstretched arms. “You little beggar, what are you doin’ here?”
Jack grinned like one confessing to a successful theft of apples belonging to a cross farmer. And then God saw fit to take away his life. He dropped suddenly, and there came a rapid pool of blood where his face had been. With his arms wrapped about the little figure that a moment before had been so warlike and gay, Aladdin turned toward the heavens a face of white flint.
“I believe in one God, Maker of hell!” he cried.
Thunder rumbled and rolled slowly across the battle-field from east, to west.
“I believe in one God, Maker of hell!” cried Aladdin, “Father of injustice and doer of hellish deeds! I believe in two damnations, the damnation of the living and the damnation of the dead.”
He turned to the little boy in his arms, and terrible sobs shook his body, so that it appeared as if he was vomiting. After a while he turned his convulsed face again to the sky.
“Come down,” he cried, “come down, you—”
Far down the hill there was a puff of white smoke, and a merciful bullet, glancing from a rock, struck Aladdin on the head with sufficient force to stretch him senseless upon the ground.
When the news of Gettysburg reached the Northern cities, lights were placed in every window, and horns were blown as at the coming of a new year. Senator Hannibal St. John had lost his three boys and the hopes of his old age in that terrible fight, but he caused his Washington house to be illuminated from basement to garret.