and draw Lee's main army to its defense.
The ruse was partly successful. There were but eighteen thousand behind
the defenses of Petersburg on the dark night when Grant massed fifty
thousand picked men before the doomed fort. The pioneers with their axes
cleared the abatis and opened the way for the charging hosts. Heavy guns
and mortars were planted to sweep the open space beyond the Salient and
beat back any attempted counter charge.

The time set for the explosion was just before dawn. The fuse was lit
and fifty thousand men stood gripping their guns, waiting for the shock.
A quarter of an hour passed and nothing happened. An ominous silence
brooded over the dawning sky. The only sounds heard were the twitter of
waking birds in the trees and hedgerows. The fuse had failed. Two heroic
men crawled into the tunnel and found it had spluttered out in a damp
spot but fifty feet from the powder. It required an hour to secure and
plant a new fuse. Day had dawned. Just in front of John Vaughan's
regiment a Confederate spy was caught. He could hear every word of the
pitiful tragedy.

He was a handsome, brown-eyed youngster of eighteen.

He glanced pathetically toward the doomed fort, and shook his head:

"Fifteen minutes more and I'd have saved you, boys!"

He turned then to the executioners:

"May I have just a minute to pray?"

"Yes."

He knelt and lifted his head, the fine young lips moving in silence as
the first rays of the rising sun flooded the scene with splendor.

"May I write just a word to my mother and to my sweetheart?" he asked
with a smile. "They're just over there in Petersburg."

"Yes."

They gave him a piece of paper and he wrote his last words of love, and
in a moment was swinging from the limb of a tree. Only a few of the more
thoughtful men paid any attention. It was nothing. Such things happened
every day. God only kept the records.

The new fuse was set and lighted. The minutes seemed hours as the men
waited breathlessly. With a dull muffled roar from the centre of the
earth beneath their very feet the fort rose two hundred feet straight
into the sky, driven by a tower of flame that stood stark and red in the
heavens. And then with blinding crash the mighty column of earth, guns,
timbers and three hundred grey bodies sank into the yawning crater. The
pit was sixty-five feet wide and three hundred feet long.

The explosion had been a complete success. The undermined fort had been
wiped fr