pistols, and
took up a small barrel of powder, part of some ammunition carried off
from some sappers and miners' stores in the raid of the past day, the
sight of which had brought to remembrance a stray, half-forgotten story
told him in boyhood of one of Soult's Army--the story on which he was
about to act now.

"For God's sake, take care!" whispered the man nearest him; and though
he was a veteran who had gone through the hottest of the campaign since
Bull's Run, his voice shook, and was husky as he spoke.

The other laughed a little--a slight, soft, languid laugh.

"All right, my dear fellow," he whispered back. "There's nothing in it
to be alarmed at; a Frenchman did it in the Peninsula, you know. Only if
I get shot, or blown up, and the alarm be given, do you take care to
bolt over and cut your way through in the first of the rush, that's
all."

Then, without more words, he laid himself down at full length with a
cord tied round his ankle, that they might know his progress, and the
cask of gunpowder, swathed in green cloth, that it should roll without
noise along the ground; and, creeping slowly on his way, propelling the
barrel with his head, and guiding it by his hands, was lost to their
sight in the darkness. By the string, as it uncoiled through their
hands, they could tell he was advancing; that was all.

The chances were as a million to one that his life would pay the forfeit
for that perilous and daring venture; a single shot and he would be
blown into the air a charred and shapeless corpse; one spark on that
rolling mass that he pushed before him, and the explosion would hurl him
upward in the silent night, mangled, dismembered, blackened, lifeless.
But his nerve was not the less cool, nor did his heart beat one throb
the quicker, as he crept noiselessly along in the black shade cast by
the parapet of the bridge, with the tramp of the guard close above on
his ear, and rifles ready to be levelled on him from the covered
earthworks if the faintest sound of his approach or the dimmest streak
of moonlight on his moving body told the Federals of his presence. He
had looked death in the teeth most days through the last five years; it
had no power to quicken or slacken a single beat of his pulse as he
propelled himself slowly forward along the black, rugged, uneven ground,
and on to the passage of the bridge, as coolly, as fearlessly, as he
would have crept through the heather and bracken after the slot of a