Talbot's face clouded and the corners of his mouth drooped.
"We have won a great victory," he said, "but it doesn't pay us. The Yankees lost twelve or fifteen thousand men, but we haven't gained anything. That firing you heard was at Cold Harbour. It was a great battle, an awful one. I hope to God I shall never see its like again. I saw fifteen thousand men stretched out on the bloody ground in rows. I don't believe that so many men ever before fell in so short a time. I have heard of a whirlwind of death, but I never saw one till then.
"We had gone into intrenchments and Grant moved against us with his whole army. They came on; you could hear 'em, the tramp of regiments and brigades, scores of thousands, and the sun rising up and turning to gold over their heads. Our cannon began. What a crash! It was like twenty thunderbolts all at once. We swept that field with tons and tons of metal. Then our rifles opened and the whistling of the bullets was like the screaming of a wind on a plain. You could see the men of that army shoot up into the air before such a sheet of metal, and you heard the cracking of bones like the breaking up of ice. After awhile those that lived had to turn back; human beings could not stand more, and we were glad when it was all over."
Talbot stayed a little while with them. Then he and his men, like the Northern cavalry, whirled off in a cloud of dust, and the little convoy resumed its solemn march southward, reaching Richmond in safety.
CHAPTER XXIV
THE DESPATCH BEARER
Leaves of yellow and red and brown were falling, and the wind that came up the valley played on the boughs like a bow on the strings of a violin. The mountain ridges piled against each other cut the blue sky like a saber's edge, and the forests on the slopes rising terrace above terrace burned in vivid colours painted by the brush of autumn. The despatch bearer's eye, sweeping peaks and slopes and valleys, saw nothing living save himself and his good horse. The silver streams in the valleys, the vivid forests on the slopes and the blue peaks above told of peace, which was also in the musical note of the wind, in the shy eyes of a deer that looked at him a moment then fled away to the forest, and in the bubbles of pink and blue that floated on the silver surface of the stream at his feet.
Prescott had been into the far South on a special mission from the Confederate Government in Richmond after his return from the Wilderness and complete recovery from his wound, and now he was going back through a sea of mountains, the great range that fills up so much of North Carolina and its fifty thousand square miles, and he was not sorry to find the way long. He enjoyed the crisp air, the winds, the burning colours of the forest, the deep blue of the sky and the infinite peace. But the nights lay cold on the ridges, and Prescott, when he could find no cabin for shelter, built a fire of pine branches and, wrapping himself in his blanket, slept with his feet to the coals. The cold increased by and by, and icy wind roared among the peaks and brought a skim of snow. Then Prescott shivered and pined for the lowlands and the haunts of men.