"Colonel, you must bear up. We are fallen on sad, sad days." His voice fails him. "Remember to-morrow; we must stand for the South."
The chivalric Virginian's voice sounds hollow and strange. He sought the regiment, won over by Valois' lofty courage and stern military pride. To-morrow the army is to grapple and crush bold Sherman. It will be a death struggle.
Yes, out of these walls, a thunderbolt, the heavy column, already warned, was to seek the Union left, and strike a Stonewall Jackson blow. Its march will be covered by the friendly woods. The keen-eyed adjutants are already warning the captains of every detail of the attack. Calm and unmoved, the gaunt centurions of the thinned host accepted the honorable charges of the forlorn hope. Valois' powder-seasoned fragment of the army was a "corps d'elite." Peyton wondered, as he watched his suffering colonel, if either would see another sparkling jewel-braided night.
The blow of Hood must be the hammer of Thor.
"To-morrow, yes, to-morrow," mechanically replied Valois. "I will be on duty to-morrow."
"To-night, Peyton," he simply said, "I must suffer my last agony. My poor Dolores! Gone—my wife."
The tears trickled through his fingers as he bowed his graceful head.
"And my little Isabel," he softly said; "she will be an orphan. Will God protect that tender child?" Valois was talking to himself, with his eyes fixed on the dark night-shadows hiding the Federal lines. A stern, defiant gaze.
Peyton shivered with a nervous chill.
"Colonel, this must not be." In the silence of the brooding night, it seems a ghastly call from another world, this message of death.