s."

So did the company to which he had deserted. "Hell and damnation!
Artillery to shake the earth! Middletown. All the wagons to pass and the
cavalry.--It isn't just Ewell's division, he says. He says it's all of
them and Stonewall Jackson!--Take the fellow up somebody and bring him
along!--_Fours right! Forward!_"

Five minutes later they reached the pike, south of Middletown. It proved
a seething stream of horse and foot and wagon train, forms shadowy and
umber, moving in the whirling dust. Over all hung like a vast and black
streamer a sense of panic. Underneath it every horse was restive and
every voice had an edge. Steve gathered that there were teamsters who
wished to turn and go back to Strasburg. He saw wagon masters plying
long black whips about the shoulders of these unwilling; he heard
officers shouting. The guns ahead boomed out, and there came a cry of
"Ashby"! The next instant found him violently unseated and hurled into
the dust of the middle road, from which he escaped by rolling with all
the velocity of which he was capable into the depression at the side. He
hardly knew what had happened--there had been, he thought, a runaway
team dragging an ordnance wagon. He seemed to remember a moving
thickness in the all-pervading dust, and, visible for an instant, a
great U. S. painted on the wagon side. Then shouts, general
scatteration, some kind of a crash--He rubbed a bump upon his forehead,
large as a guinea hen's egg. "Gawd! I wish I'd never come into this here
world!"

The world was, indeed, to-day rather like a bad dream--like one of those
dim and tangled streams of things, strange and frightful, at once
grotesquely unfamiliar and sickeningly real, which one neighbours for a
time in sleep. Steve picked himself out of the ditch, being much in
danger, even there, of trampling hoofs or wagons gone amuck, and
attained, how he could not tell, a rank wayside clump of Jamestown weed
and pokeberry. In the midst of this he squatted, gathered into as small
a bunch as was physically possible. He was in a panic; the sweat cold
upon the back of his hands. Action or inaction in this world, sitting,
standing, or going seemed alike ugly and dangerous.

First of all, this world was blue-clad and he was dressed in grey. It
was in a wild hurry; the main stream striving somehow to gain
Middletown, which must be passed, hook or crook, aid of devil or aid of
saint, while a second current surged with increasing strength b