Chapter X. The Northern March - Page 2

the younger officers turned away.

Harry was in a boat near the right bank when he saw another boat about thirty yards from the left shore. It contained a half dozen men, and he recognized one of the figures at once. Putting his hands, trumpet-shaped, to his mouth, he shouted:

"Mr. Shepard! Oh, I say, Mr. Shepard!"

The man looked up, and, evidently recognizing Harry, he had the boat rowed a little nearer. Harry had his own moved forward a little, and he stopped at a point where they could talk conveniently.

"You may not believe me," said Shepard, "but I felt pleasure when I heard your voice and recognized your face. I am glad to know that you did not fall in the great battle."

"I do believe you, and I am not merely exchanging compliments when I say that I rejoice that you, too, came out of it alive."

"Nevertheless, luck was against us then," said Shepard, and Harry, even at the distance, saw a shadow cross his face. "I saw the great flank movement of Jackson and I understood its nature. I was on my way to General Hooker with all speed to warn him, and I would have got there in time had it not been for a chance bullet that stunned me. That bullet cost us thousands of men."

"And the bullets that struck General Jackson will cost us a whole army corps."

"We hear that they were fired by your own men."

"So they were. A North Carolina company in the darkness took us for the enemy."

"I don't rejoice over the fall of a great and valiant foe, but whether Jackson lived or died the result would be the same. I told you long ago that the forces of the Union could never be beaten in the long run, and I repeated it to you another time. Now I repeat it once more. We have lost two great battles here, but you make no progress. We menace you as much as ever."

"But your newspapers say you're growing very tired. There's no nation so big that it can't be exhausted."

"But you'll be exhausted first. So long, I see some of our generals coming out on the bluffs with their glasses. I suppose we mustn't appear too friendly."

"Good-bye, Mr. Shepard. We've lost Jackson, but we've many a good man yet. I think our next great battle will be farther north."

They had not spoken as enemies, but as friends who held different views upon an important point, and now they rowed back peacefully, each to his own shore.

With the return of Longstreet, the Southern army was raised to greater numbers than at Chancellorsville. With Stuart's matchless cavalry it numbered nearly eighty thousand men, most of them veterans, and a cry for invasion came from the South. What was the use of victories like Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, if they merely left matters where they were? The fighting hitherto had