"Where do you think the main attack will be?"

"On Jackson, who is still in front of us. But we have waited a long
time. It must be full noon now."

"It is past noon, sir, but I hear the trumpets, calling up our men."

"They are calling to us, too."

The regiment shifted a little to the right, where a great column was
forming for a direct attack upon the Confederate lines. Twenty thousand
men stood in a vast line and forty thousand were behind them to march in
support.

Dick had thought that he would be insensible to emotions, but his heart
began to throb again. The spectacle thrilled and awed him--the great
army marching to the attack and the resolute army awaiting it. Soon he
heard behind him the firing of the artillery which sent shot and shell
over their heads at the enemy. A dozen cannon came into action, then
twenty, fifty, a hundred and more, and the earth trembled with the
mighty concussion.

Dick felt the surge of triumph. They had yet met no answering fire.
Perhaps General Pope and not Colonel Winchester had been right after
all, and the Confederates were crushed. Awaiting them was only a rear
guard which would flee at the first flash of the bayonets in the wood.

The great line marched steadily onward, and the cannon thundered and
roared over the heads of the men raking the wood with steel. Still
no reply. Surely the sixty thousand Union men would now march over
everything. They were driving in the swarms of skirmishers. Dick could
see them retreating everywhere, in the wood over the hills and along an
embankment.

Warner was on his right and Pennington on his left. Dick glanced at them
and he saw the belief in speedy victory expressed on the faces of both.
It seemed to him, too, that nothing could now stop the massive
columns that Pope was sending forward against the thinned ranks of the
Confederates.

They were much nearer and he saw gray lines along an embankment and in
a wood. Then above the crash and thunder of their covering artillery he
heard another sound. It was the Southern bugles calling with a piercing
note to their own men just as the Northern trumpets had called.

Dick saw a great gray multitude suddenly pour forward. It looked to him
in the blur and the smoke like an avalanche, and in truth it was a human
avalanche, a far greater force of the South than they expected to
meet there. Directly in front of the Union column stood the Stonewall
Brigade, and all the chosen veterans of St