Just when he made the discovery through his field glass of the havoc being wrought by the rebel battery and the momentary hesitation, Pleasanton, who did not happen to be in the best of humors with reference to it, was placed in the same situation in which Wellington for a few moments found himself on the day of Waterloo, when he employed the button-bagman with the blue umbrella under his arm, to carry some important orders. He was, in short, out of aide-de-camps. One by one they had been sent away to different points, and it so chanced, just then, that none had returned. Something very much like an oath muttered between the lips of the impatient veteran of forty, and one exclamation came out so that there was no difficulty in recognizing it:
"Nobody here when everybody is worst wanted! I wish the d—l had the whole pack of them!"
"Perhaps I can do what you wish, General."
The words came from a young man in civilian's dress—gray pants and broad-brimmed felt hat, but with a military suspicion in his coat of light blue flannel,—who stood very near the commander, his horse's bridle over arm and a large field glass in hand, and who had apparently been scanning with much interest a scene of blood in which it was neither his duty nor his disposition to take part.
"You?" and the veteran turned upon him, with something very like a laugh on his lips. "You? Humph! Do you know what I want?"
"Some one to carry an order, I suppose!"
"Exactly! Over that causeway, to Kilpatrick at the bridge. Do you see how that flanking battery to the left is raking every thing, and the one in front is throwing beyond Kil's position? The chances are about even that the man who starts never gets there! Now do you wish to go?"
"No objection on that account!" was the reply of the young man, who seemed to be on terms of very easy intimacy with the General, as indeed he was,—a privileged visitor, who had accompanied him in the advance, but eminently "unattached" and thus far neither fighting nor expected to fight.
"The d—l you haven't! Well, ——, that is certainly cool, for you! Never mind—if you like a little personal taste of what war really is, take this," and he scribbled a few words on a slip of paper on his raised knee—"take this and get it to Kilpatrick as soon as you can. If you do not come back again, I shall send word to your family."
"Oh, yes, thank you, General; but I shall come back again!" He had swung himself into the saddle of his gray, while Pleasanton was writing, and the veteran held the paper for one instant in his hand and looked into his face with a strange interest. What he saw there seemed to satisfy him, and he handed the paper with a nod. The volunteer aide-de-camp received it with a bow, and the next moment was flying towards the front of the Third, riding splendidly, running the gauntlet that has before been suggested, but untouched, and delivering his orders in very quick time and at emphatically the right moment. The important movement which immediately followed has already been narrated, in its bearing on the result of the day; but there were other effects not less important when personal destinies are taken into the account.