gebox. You'll need lots of 'em, if you're only goin' to shoot to
crease your rebels, as that feller did you."

It was not brilliant pleasantry, but it served. It set them to thinking
of something else. They hastily filled their cartridge-boxes, adjusted
their blankets, and when the bugle sounded forward they started with
something of their original nerve.

The regiment moved off at the head of the brigade, and after a march of
a mile or so came out upon a hill from which they could see one of our
batteries having an unequal fight with several of the rebel batteries
in a fort far to its front. Our cannoneers were standing up bravely
to their work, but the rebel shells were bursting about them in a wild
storm of crashing, deafening explosions, and hurtling, shrieking masses
of iron. The sharp crack of their own rifles was at times drowned by the
ear-splitting din of the bursting shells.

"Goodness!" murmured Monty Scruggs, with colorless lips, as the regiment
came into line and moved forward to the battery's line of caissons at
the bottom of the hill. "I'm so glad I didn't enlist in the artillery. I
don't see how anybody up there can live a minute."

"Yes, it looks like as if those artillery boys are earnin' their $13 a
month about every second of their lives," remarked Shorty. "There ought
to be some other batteries loafin' around somewhere that could join in."

The boys leaned on their muskets and watched the awful spectacle with
dazed eyes. It seemed far more terrible even than the ordeal through
which they had just been.

The battery was one of the oldest and best in the army, and its "fire
discipline" was superb.

The Captain stood on a little elevation to the rear and somewhat apart,
intently studying the rebel line through his field-glasses. After a
few words of direction as to the pointing of the guns, and the command,
"Begin firing," he had given no orders, scarcely spoken. He could not
have been heard in that terrible turmoil. He had simply brought his
terrible engine of destruction--the engine upon which he and his men had
lavished years of laborious drilling and training--into position, and
set it going.

What the result would be fate alone would determine. That was a matter
that neither he nor his men regarded. If it destroyed or crippled its
opponents it was simply doing the work for which it had been created.
If its opponents destroyed it, that was a contingency to be accepted. It
was there to endu