"Oh yes, fact!" continued the Captain, who saw the white face and did not intend that it should regain any fresher color, in a hurry. "Bloody times, I tell you, Colonel! Make me think, sometimes, when the dead are lying in heaps around me and the blood running like small brooks, of that time prophesied for the Valley of Armageddon, when the blood is to run deep enough to reach to the horse-bridles."
"Captain," said the Colonel, "really I would rather—"
"Rather that I should talk about the present war, than anything in Scripture? of course—very natural and quite correct. Let me see—you were not at Fair Oaks, were you?"
"No," said the Colonel, emphatically.
"No, I suppose not," continued the pseudo-Captain. "Well, you ought to have been there—that is all! Highest old fight that any man ever heard of. When we went into battle we had not had a wink of sleep for ten nights, but I tell you that it kept us wide awake while it lasted! In the middle of the day the air was so thick with bullets and shells that it seemed to be as dark as twilight, and the blood at one time made such a river down one of the gulleys that dozens of men and horses were drowned in it!"
"Oh, this is too much!" gasped the Colonel, who thought of getting up and running away, anywhere beyond the sound of the voice of this sanguinary madman.
"Too much? of course it was too much!" echoed the veracious narrator. "But who could help it? Couldn't have so many dead men, you know, without plenty of blood! At one time there were so many of our fellows lying in a long win-row near the top of the hill, that when the rebels made an advance we punched holes through the wall of corpses and used them for breast-works."
The Colonel made an effort to stagger to his feet, but his nerves were too terribly unstrung to allow him that escape. He sunk back upon his chair in a state of partial syncope, aware that the terrible fellow was talking, and that he must be lying, but that there might be truth enough at the base of his stories to make them a fearful warning to all who had ever thought of tempting the field.
"Talk about the chances of war!" the incorrigible romancer went on—"there was no chance about it, in such a fight as that at Fair Oaks or at Gaines' Mills! We went into Fair Oaks nine hundred and eighty-four strong, and came out four—three men and one officer! I was the officer. I only had one Minie bullet through the left breast, too high to do much harm, two bullets in the left leg and right foot, my left arm broken by a fragment of shell and my right eye punched out by another. That was all that ailed me!"
"Heavens! heavens!" was all that the stupified Colonel could articulate.