"No," answered the Captain; "help has been sent for for them, and there it comes."
He pointed back over the hill to where two batteries were coming from different directions on a dead run. It was a magnificent sight. One battery was following the road, and the other cutting across the open space in a hot race to get ahead and be in action first.
The Captains were galloping ahead to point out the way. The Sergeants were alongside, seconding the whips of the drivers with strokes of the flats of their sabers on the animals' hanches. The six horses to each gun were galloping like mad, snatching the heavy piece over gullies, bumps, logs, and rocks as if it were a straw. The gunners had abandoned their usual calm pose with folded arms on the limber chests, and were maintaining their seats only by a desperate clutch on the side-irons.
The boys turned even from the storm in front to watch the thrilling spectacle.
The two Captains were fairly abreast as they led their batteries up the long slope, crushing the brush, sending sticks and stones flying from the heavy, flying wheels. Both reached the crest at the same time, and the teams, wheeling around at a gallop, flung the muzzles of the cannon toward the enemy. Without waiting for them to stop the nimble cannoneers sprang to ground, unlimbered the guns, rolled them into position, sent loads down their black throats, and before it was fairly realized that they had reached the crest hurled a storm of shells across the valley at the rebel batteries.
"Hooray! Hooray! They're gittin' some o' their own medicine now," yelled the excited regiment. "Sock it to 'em. How do you like that, you ill-begotten imps of rebels?"
The rebel cannoneers seemed to lose heart at once under the storm of fire that beat upon them. The volume of their fire diminished at once, and then became fitful and irregular. Two of their limbers were blown up in succession, with thunderous noise, and this further discouraged them.
Obeying a common impulse, the 200th Ind., regardless of the dropping shells, had left its position, and pressed forward toward the crest, where it could see what was going on.
The Colonel permitted this, for he anticipated that a charge on the rebel works would follow the beating down of the artillery fire, and he wanted his regiment to be where it would get a good start in the race to capture a rebel battery. He simply cautioned the Captains to keep their men in hand and ready. As Capt. McGillicuddy called Co. Q closer together, it occurred to Shorty that in the interest he had taken in the artillery duel he had not looked after Pete Skidmore for some time, and he began casting his eyes around for that youth. He was nowhere to be seen, and, of course, no one knew anything about him.
"Why don't you get a rope. Shorty, and tie the blamed kid to you, and not be pestering yourself and everybody else about him all the time?" asked the Orderly-Sergeant irritably, for he was deeply intent upon the prospective charge, and did not want to be bothered. "He's more worry than he's worth."