A Son of the Gods and A Horseman in the Sky | Page 5

and away. Away,
indeed - they are making directly to our left, parallel to the now steadily
blazing and smoking wall. The rattle of the musketry is continuous, and
every bullet's target is that courageous heart.
Suddenly a great bank of white smoke pushes upward from behind the
wall. Another and another - a dozen roll up before the thunder of the
explosions and the humming of the missiles reach our ears, and the
missiles themselves come bounding through clouds of dust into our
covert, knocking over here and there a man and causing a temporary
distraction, a passing thought of self.
The dust drifts away. Incredible! - that enchanted horse and rider have
passed a ravine and are climbing another slope to unveil another
conspiracy of silence, to thwart the will of another armed host. Another
moment and that crest too is in eruption. The horse rears and strikes the
air with its forefeet. They are down at last. But look again - the man has
detached himself from the dead animal. He stands erect, motionless,
holding his sabre in his right hand straight above his head. His face is
toward us. Now he lowers his hand to a level with his face and moves it
outward, the blade of the sabre describing a downward curve. It is a
sign to us, to the world, to posterity. It is a hero's salute to death and
history.
Again the spell is broken; our men attempt to cheer; they are choking
with emotion; they utter hoarse, discordant cries; they clutch their

weapons and press tumultuously forward into the open. The
skirmishers, without orders, against orders, are going forward at a keen
run, like hounds unleashed. Our cannon speak and the enemy's now
open in full chorus; to right and left as far as we can see, the distant
crest, seeming now so near, erects its towers of cloud, and the great
shot pitch roaring down among our moving masses. Flag after flag of
ours emerges from the wood, line after line sweeps forth, catching the
sunlight on its burnished arms. The rear battalions alone are in
obedience; they preserve their proper distance from the insurgent front.
The commander has not moved. He now removes his field-glass from
his eyes and glances to the right and left. He sees the human current
flowing on either side of him and his huddled escort, like tide waves
parted by a rock. Not a sign of feeling in his face; he is thinking. Again
he directs his eyes forward; they slowly traverse that malign and awful
crest. He addresses a calm word to his bugler. Tra-la-la! Tra-la-la! The
injunction has an imperiousness which enforces it. It is repeated by all
the bugles of all the subordinate commanders; the sharp metallic notes
assert themselves above the hum of the advance, and penetrate the
sound of the cannon. To halt is to withdraw. The colors move slowly
back, the lines face about and sullenly follow, bearing their wounded;
the skirmishers return, gathering up the dead.
Ah, those many, many needless dead! That great soul whose beautiful
body is lying over yonder, so conspicuous against the sere hillside -
could it not have been spared the bitter consciousness of a vain
devotion? Would one exception have marred too much the pitiless
perfection of the divine, eternal plan?

A Horseman in the Sky

One sunny afternoon in the autumn of the year 1861, a soldier lay in a
clump of laurel by the side of a road in Western Virginia. He lay at full
length, upon his stomach, his feet resting upon the toes, his head upon
the left forearm. His extended right hand loosely grasped his rifle. But

for the somewhat methodical disposition of his limbs and a slight
rhythmic movement of the cartridge-box at the back of his belt, he
might have been thought to be dead. He was asleep at his post of duty.
But if detected he would be dead shortly afterward, that being the just
and legal penalty of his crime.
The clump of laurel in which the criminal lay was in the angle of a road
which, after, ascending, southward, a steep acclivity to that point,
turned sharply to the west, running along the summit for perhaps one
hundred yards. There it turned southward again and went zigzagging
downward through the forest. At the salient of that second angle was a
large flat rock, jutting out northward, overlooking the deep valley from
which the road ascended. The rock capped a high cliff; a stone dropped
from its outer edge would have fallen sheer downward one thousand
feet to the tops of the pines. The angle where the soldier lay was on
another spur of the same cliff. Had he been awake, he would