reat battles is
this since they met first in the Wilderness?"

Nobody could tell; they had lost count.

The tumult lasted about an hour and then died away, to be succeeded by a
stillness intense and painful. The sun shone with a white glare. No wind
stirred. The leaves and the grass drooped. The fields were deserted;
there was not a sign of life in them, either human or animal. The road
lay before them, a dusty streak.

None came to tell of the battle, and, oppressed by anxiety, Prescott
moved on. Some horsemen appeared on the hills the next morning, and as
they approached, Prescott, with indescribable joy, recognized in the
lead the figure of Talbot, whose unknown fate they had mourned. Talbot
delightedly shook hands with them all, not neglecting Lucia Catherwood.
His honest face glowed with emotion.

"I am on a scout around our army now," he said, "and I thought I should
find you near here somewhere. I wanted to tell you what had become of
me. I was captured that night we were crossing the river--some of my
blundering--but I escaped the next night. It was easy enough to do it.
There was so much fighting and so much of everything going on that I
just rose up and walked out of the Yankee camp. Nobody had time to pay
any attention to me. I got back to Lee--somehow I knew I must do it, as
he could never win the war without me--and here I am."

"There was a battle yesterday morning; we heard it," said Prescott.

Talbot's face clouded and the corners of his mouth drooped.

"We have won a great victory," he said, "but it doesn't pay us. The
Yankees lost twelve or fifteen thousand men, but we haven't gained
anything. That firing you heard was at Cold Harbour. It was a great
battle, an awful one. I hope to God I shall never see its like again. I
saw fifteen thousand men stretched out on the bloody ground in rows. I
don't believe that so many men ever before fell in so short a time. I
have heard of a whirlwind of death, but I never saw one till then.

"We had gone into intrenchments and Grant moved against us with his
whole army. They came on; you could hear 'em, the tramp of regiments
and brigades, scores of thousands, and the sun rising up and turning to
gold over their heads. Our cannon began. What a crash! It was like
twenty thunderbolts all at once. We swept that field with tons and tons
of metal. Then our rifles opened and the whistling of the bullets was
like the screaming of a wind on a plain. You could see the