He had almost reached the grave when the corpse gave a vicious kick and yelled:
"Here—what'ell!"
Julius didn't stop to look or to answer. What he felt in his hands was enough. With a yell of terror he dropped the thing and plunged straight ahead.
"Gawd, save me!" he gasped.
His foot slipped on the edge of the trench and he rolled in the dark hole. With the leap of a frightened panther he reached the solid earth and flew, each leap a muttered prayer:
"Save me! Lawd, save me!"
Standing there beside the grim piles of his dead comrades John Vaughan joined the guard in uncontrollable laughter. It was many a day before he saw his cook again.
The laughter suddenly stopped, and he turned from the scene with a shudder.
"I wonder," he muttered, "if I live through this war, whether I'll come out of it with a soul!"
The report from Chancellorsville drifted slowly, ominously, appallingly, over Washington with the clouds and mists of the storm which swept up the Potomac and shrouded the city in a grey mantle of mourning. The White House was still. The dead were walking through its great rooms of state. The anguished heart who watched by the window toward the hills of Virginia saw and heard each muffled footfall.