The Brigade Commander | Page 9

extremity, Captain," replied Waldron.
"We have business to settle to-morrow."
"I ask no favors on that account. I hope you will offer me none."
"In case of need I shall spare no one," declared Waldron.
Then he took out his watch, looked at it impatiently, put it to his ear,
restored it to his pocket, and fell into an attitude of deep attention.
Evidently his whole mind was on his battle, and he was waiting,
watching, yearning for its outburst.
"If he wins this fight," thought Fitz Hugh, "how can I do him a harm?
And yet," he added, "how can I help it?"
Minutes passed. Fitz Hugh tried to think of his injury, and to steel
himself against his chief. But the roar of battle on the right, and the

suspense and imminence of battle on the left, absorbed the attention of
even this wounded and angry spirit, as, indeed, they might have
absorbed that of any being not more or less than human. A private
wrong, insupportable though it might be, seemed so small amid that
deadly clamor and awful expectation! Moreover, the intellect which
worked so calmly and vigorously by his side, and which alone of all
things near appeared able to rule the coming crisis, began to dominate
him, in spite of his sense of injury. A thought crossed him to the effect
that the great among men are too valuable to be punished for their evil
deeds. He turned to the absorbed brigade commander, now not only his
ruler, but even his protector, with a feeling that he must accord him a
word of peace, a proffer in some form of possible forgiveness and
friendship. But the man's face was clouded and stern with responsibility
and authority. He seemed at that moment too lofty to be approached
with a message of pardon. Fitz Hugh gazed at him with a mixture of
prof ound respect and smothered hate. He gazed, turned away, and
remained silent.
Minutes more passed. Then a mounted orderly dashed up at full speed,
with the words, "Colonel, Major Gahogan has fronted."
"Has he?" answered Waldron, with a smile which thanked the trooper
and made him happy. "Ride on through the thicket here, my man, and
tell Colonel Gildersleeve to push up his skirmishers."
With a thud of hoofs and a rustling of parting foliage the cavalryman
disappeared amid the underwood. A minute or two later a thin,
dropping rattle of musketry, five hundred yards or so to the front,
announced that the sharpshooters of the Fourteenth were at work.
Almost immediately there was an angry response, full of the
threatenings and execution of death. Through the lofty leafage tore the
screech of a shell, bursting with a sharp crash as it passed overhead,
and scattering in humming slivers. Then came another, and another,
and many more, chasing each other with hoarse hissings through the
trembling air, a succession of flying serpents. The enemy doubtless
believed that nearly the whole attacking force was massed in the wood
around the road, and they had brought at least four guns to bear upon

that point, and were working them with the utmost possible rapidity.
Presently a large chestnut, not fifty yards from Fitz Hugh, was struck
by a shot. The solid trunk, nearly three feet in diameter, parted asunder
as if it were the brittlest of vegetable matter. The upper portion started
aside with a monstrous groan, dropped in a standing posture to the
earth, and then toppled slowly, sublimely prostrate, its branches
crashing and all its leaves wailing. Ere long, a little further to the front,
another Anak of the forest went down; and, mingled with the noise of
its sylvan agony, there arose sharp cries of human suffering. Then
Colonel Colburn, a broad-chested and ruddy man of thirty-five, with a
look of indignant anxiety in his iron-gray eyes, rode up to the brigade
commander.
"This is very annoying, Colonel," he said. "I am losing my men without
using them. That last tree fell into my command."
"Are they firing toward our left?" asked Waldron.
"Not a shot."
"Very good," said the chief, with a sigh of contentment. "If we can only
keep them occupied in this direction! By the way, let your men lie
down under the fallen tree, as far as it will go. It will protect them from
others."
Colburn rode back to his regiment. Waldron looked impatiently at his
watch. At that moment a fierce burst of line firing arose in front,
followed and almost overborne by a long-drawn yell, the scream of
charging men. Waldron put up his watch, glanced excitedly at Fitz
Hugh, and smiled.
"I must forgive or forget," the latter could not help saying to himself.
"All the rest of life is nothing compared with this."
"Captain," said