and swept resistless across the sodden fields to where the
bank was steepest. The fire from the battery scorched the hair of their
heads. But there they stayed, scooping out the yellow clay with torn
hands, while the Parrotts, with lowered muzzles, ploughed the slope with
shells. There they stayed, while the blue lines quivered and fell back
through the forests on that short winter's afternoon, dragging their
wounded from the stagnant waters. But many were left to die in agony in
the solitude.

Like a tall emblem of energy, General Sherman stood watching the attack
and repulse, his eyes ever alert. He paid no heed to the shells which
tore the limbs from the trees about him, or sent the swamp water in thick
spray over his staff. Now and again a sharp word broke from his lips, a
forceful home thrust at one of the leaders of his columns.

"What regiment stayed under the bank?"

"Sixth Missouri, General," said an aide, promptly.

The General sat late in the Admiral's gunboat that night, but when he
returned to his cabin in the Forest Queen, he called for a list of
officers of the Sixth Missouri. His finger slipping down the roll paused
at a name among the new second lieutenants.

"Did the boys get back?" he asked. "Yes, General, when it fell dark."

"Let me see the casualties,--quick."

That night a fog rolled up from the swamps, and in the morning jack-staff
was hid from pilot-house. Before the attack could be renewed, a political
general came down the river with a letter in his pocket from Washington,
by virtue of which he took possession of the three army core, and their
chief, subpoenaed the fleet and the Admiral, and went off to capture
Arkansas Post.

Vicksburg had a breathing spell.

Three weeks later, when the army was resting at Napoleon, Arkansas, a
self-contained man, with a brown beard arrived from Memphis, and took
command. This way General U. S. Grant. He smoked incessantly in his
cabin. He listened. He spoke but seldom. He had look in his face that
boded ill to any that might oppose him. Time and labor be counted as
nothing, compared with the accomplishment of an object. Back to Vicksburg
paddled the fleet and transports. Across the river from the city, on the
pasty mud behind the levee's bank were dumped Sherman's regiments,
condemned to week of ditch-digging, that the gunboats might arrive at the
bend of the Mississippi below by a canal, out of reach of the batteries.
Day in and day out they labor