"Fifteen minutes more and I'd have saved you, boys!"
He turned then to the executioners:
"May I have just a minute to pray?"
"Yes."
He knelt and lifted his head, the fine young lips moving in silence as the first rays of the rising sun flooded the scene with splendor.
"May I write just a word to my mother and to my sweetheart?" he asked with a smile. "They're just over there in Petersburg."
"Yes."
They gave him a piece of paper and he wrote his last words of love, and in a moment was swinging from the limb of a tree. Only a few of the more thoughtful men paid any attention. It was nothing. Such things happened every day. God only kept the records.
The new fuse was set and lighted. The minutes seemed hours as the men waited breathlessly. With a dull muffled roar from the centre of the earth beneath their very feet the fort rose two hundred feet straight into the sky, driven by a tower of flame that stood stark and red in the heavens. And then with blinding crash the mighty column of earth, guns, timbers and three hundred grey bodies sank into the yawning crater. The pit was sixty-five feet wide and three hundred feet long.
The explosion had been a complete success. The undermined fort had been wiped from the landscape. A great gap opened in Lee's lines marked by the grave of three hundred of his men.