n front was frightful. The head of the
column of which he now formed an unwilling part, the head of the snake,
must be somewhere near Newtown, the rattling tail just out of Strasburg.
The snake was trying to get clear, trying to get out of the middle
Valley to Winchester, fifteen miles away. It was trying to drag its
painful length through the village just ahead. There were scorpions in
the village, on both sides the pike, on the hills above. Stonewall
Jackson with his old sabre, with his "Good! Good!" was hacking at the
snake, just there, in its middle. The old sabre had not yet cut quite
through, but there was hope--or fear--(the deserter positively did not
know which) that presently it would be done. A tall soldier, beside
whom, in the dream torrent, Steve found himself, began to talk. "Got any
water? No. Nobody has. I guess it's pouring down rain in New Bedford
this very minute! All the little streams running." He sighed. "'T ain't
no use in fussing. I don't remember to have ever seen you before, but
then we're all mixed up--"

"We are," said Steve. "Ain't the racket awful?"

"Awful. 'T is going to be like running the gauntlet, to run that town,
and we're most there. If I don't get out alive, and if you ever go to
New Bedford--Whoa, there! Look out!"

Steve, thrust by the press away from the pike into a Middletown street,
looked for a cellar door through which he might descend and be in
darkness. All the street was full of struggling forms. A man on
horseback, tall and horrible in the nightmare, cut at him with a sabre
as long as himself. Steve ducked, went under the horse's belly, and came
up to have a pistol shot take the cap from his head. With a yell he ran
beneath the second horse's arching neck. The animal reared; a third
horseman raised his carbine. There was an overturned Conestoga wagon in
the middle of the street, its white top like a bubble in all the wild
swirl and eddy of the place. Steve and the ball from the carbine passed
under the arch at the same instant, the bullet lodging somewhere in the
wagon bed.

Steve at first thought he might be dead, for it was cool and dark under
the tilted canvas, and there was a momentary effect of quietness. The
carbine had been fired; perhaps the bullet was in his brain. The
uncertainty held but a second; outside the fracas burst forth again, and
beneath him something moved in the straw. It proved to be the driver of
the wagon, wounded, and fallen back from the se