sile hurled from a cannon's mouth
was crashing among them. A litter arrived now and they carried him
toward a house that had been used as a tavern. A shot struck one of
the men who held the litter in his arm and he was compelled to let go.
The litter tipped over and Jackson fell heavily to the ground, his whole
weight crashing upon his wounded arm. Harry heard him utter then his
first and only groan. The boy himself cried out in horror.

But they lifted him up again, and the litter bearers carried him on,
the young officers crowded close around him. Although it was far on
toward midnight, the roar of the battle swelled afresh through the
Wilderness. They came presently to an ambulance, by the side of which
Jackson's physician, Dr. McGuire, stood. The surgeon, tears in his eyes,
bent over the general and asked him if he were badly hurt. Jackson
replied that he thought he was dying.

An officer of high rank, Colonel Crutchfield, whom Jackson esteemed
highly, was already lying in the ambulance, wounded severely. They
put Jackson beside him and drove slowly toward the rear. Once, when
Crutchfield groaned under the jolting of the ambulance, Jackson made
them stop until his comrade was easier. Then the mournful procession
moved on, while the battle roared and crashed about the lone ambulance
that bore the stricken idol of the Confederacy, Lee's right arm, the man
without whom the South could not win. Harry heard long afterward that a
minister in New Orleans used in his prayer some such words as these, "Oh,
Lord, when Thou in Thy infinite wisdom didst decree that the Southern
Confederacy should fail, Thou hadst first to take away Thy servant,
Stonewall Jackson."

Harry and Dalton might have followed the ambulance that carried Jackson
away, as they were members of his staff, but they felt that their place
was on this dusky battlefield. While they paused, not knowing what to
do, a body of men came through the brushwood and they recognized the
upright and martial figures of Colonel Leonidas Talbot and
Lieutenant-Colonel Hector St. Hilaire. Just behind them were St. Clair,
Langdon and the rest of the Invincibles. The two colonels turned and
gazed at the retreating ambulance, a shadow for a moment in the dusk,
and then a shadow gone.

"I saw them putting an officer in that ambulance, Harry," said Colonel
Talbot. "Who was it?"

Harry choked and made no answer.

Colonel Talbot, surprised, turned to Dalton.

"