“Cheer up, Cuthbert, you’ll soon be dead!”
Ten minutes later he thrust poor Pike into the kitchen inclosure and shouted to the cook:
“The sooner you kill him the better—go as far as you like!”
CHAPTER XXIX
TO Vassar sleep had been impossible for the past two nights. He dozed for an hour during the day from sheer exhaustion, but the nearer the hour came for the test of strength between the opposing armies on which hung the fate of a hundred million people, the deeper became his excitement.
All life seemed to mirror itself in a vast luminous crystal before his eyes—the past, the present, the future.
He nodded in the saddle as he watched the construction of the second line of entrenchments five miles in the rear of the first. He wondered at the long reach of that first possible retreat. It was an ominous sign. It revealed the fear in the heart of the American commander.
He fell into a fevered dream. Far up in the sky he saw the sneering face of the Devil bending low over our shores and from his right hand shaking dice. The dice were the skulls of men. They rattled over the wide plain of our coming battlefield. The hideous face twisted with demoniac laughter as he shook the skulls and threw again.
He watched the game with bated breath. The count was made at last and we had lost!
And yet somehow it was well with the dreamer’s soul. An angel took him by the hand and led him from the field on which the skulls lay.