“Who,” asked Grant from the eminence where he stood,—“who ordered those men up the hill?”
He spoke curtly, anger in his voice. “Some one will suffer for it,” he said, “if it turns out badly.”
But, for the blue, it did not turn out badly....
When the thunder and shouting was all over, when the short desperate mêlée was ended, when the guns were silenced and taken, when the blue wave had triumphed on the height of Missionary, and the grey had fallen backward and down, when the pursuit was checked, when the broken grey army rested in the November forest, when the day closed sombrely with one red gleam in the west, three soldiers, having scraped together dead leaves and twigs and lit a fire, nodded at one another across the blaze.
“Didn’t I tell you,” said one, “that that thar moon was the Confederacy and that that thar thing stealing across it was the End?”
“And didn’t I tell you,” said the second, “that thar don’t nothing end? Ef a thing has been, it Is.”
“Well, I reckon you’ll allow,” spoke the third, “that we’ve had an awful defeat this day?”
“A lot of wise men,” said the second, “have lived on this here earth, but the man that’s wise enough to tell what’s defeat and what isn’t hasn’t yet appeared. However, I’ll allow that it looks like defeat.”
“Wouldn’t you call it defeat if every army of us surrendered, and they took down the Stars and Bars from over the Capitol at Richmond?”
“Well, that depends,” said the second. “Got any tobacco?”