e slightest sound could
escape the tightly drawn drums of his ears.

He was motionless a full ten minutes. Nor did the horse beside him stir.
It was a test of human endurance, the capacity to keep himself absolutely
silent, but with every nerve attuned, while he waited for an invisible
danger. And those minutes were precious, too. The value of not a single
one of them could have been measured or weighed. It was his duty to
reach Longstreet at speed, because the general and his veterans must be
in line in the morning, when the battle was joined. Yet the incessant
duel between Shepard and himself was at its height again, and he did not
yet see how he could end it.

Harry felt that it must be essentially a struggle of patience, but when
he waited a few minutes longer, the idea to wait with ears close to the
earth, one of the oldest devices of primitive man, occurred to him.
It was fairly dry in the bushes, and he lay down, pressing his ear to the
soil. Then he heard a faint sound, as if some one crawling through the
grass, like a wild animal stalking its prey. It was Shepard, of course,
and then Harry planned his campaign. Shepard had left his horse, and was
endeavoring to reach him by stealth.

Leaving his own horse, he crept a little to the right, and then rising
carefully in another thicket he picked out every dark spot in the gloom.
He made out presently the figure of a riderless horse, standing partly
behind the trunk of an oak, larger than most of those that grew in the
Wilderness.

Harry knew that it was Shepard's mount and that Shepard himself was some
distance in front of it creeping toward the thicket which he supposed
sheltered his foe. There was barely enough light for Harry to see the
horse's head and regretfully he raised his heavy pistol. But it had to
be done, and when his aim was true he pulled the trigger.

The report of the pistol was almost like the roar of a cannon in the
desolate Wilderness and made Harry himself jump. Then he promptly threw
himself flat upon his face. Shepard's answering fire came from a point
about thirty yards in front of the horse, and the bullet passed very
close over Harry's head. It was a marvelous shot to be made merely at
the place from which a sound had come. It all passed in a flash, and
the next moment Harry heard the sound of a horse falling and kicking a
little. Then it too was still.

He remained only a half minute in the grass. Then he began to cr