A big gun boomed far away in the dark. From nearer came the snip-snap of picket-shooting, which increased to a rattle and settled into volleying. On the hill to the right some one climbed on a gun-carriage and stood vaguely against the sky.

Shadows came running from the door of a barn into the grass. A sleeper cried out and sat up at their feet, rubbing his trodden hand.

"What do you make it?"

"We have no troops over there. They're shooting each other."

"Shooting their midnight dreams."

"Midnight! It's past three."

"How should I know? I was king of the Pleiades five minutes ago."

"Time for trouble to begin?"

"It won't be light for an hour."

"No. Turn in, gentlemen."

Shadows sat upright in the grass and muttered to each other.

"What's the Pleiades, Jimmie?"

"Do' know. Wa'n't any at home as I know of."

"Stars, you galoop."

"That's what the Johnnies were shooting at."

"Hey! He must 'a' been jokin'," from the shadow called Jimmie.

"Who?"

"The cap'n said he was king of 'em, he did."

"Oh, go to—"

"Can't see any stars to-night."

The distant volleying died down to a rattle—to the crack of a single rifle far away, lonely in the immense night, the encircling silence.

The woods went around behind the hill on the right. On the left a grassy field stretched off in the dark. One knew by remembrance that it sloped down a gradual mile, till it came somewhere to a slow creek with a mud bottom. Outposts lay forward in a thin line of woods. Some one said that the pickets were in an open field beyond, and that some of them belonged to the other side. In that tense, visionary hour one did not conceive of an enemy as of separate men, watchful in fields, sleeping in distant woods, but of a creature, a thing of folded miles, crouching, sinister, hostile, with red tongue and bitter fangs, waiting for the dawn.

Some of the dark lumps in the grass were motionless, some stirred and muttered. Through the open door of the barn a group of men could be seen around a lantern and leaning forward. One of them marked and pointed with his finger. A horse kicked and squealed on the hill among the guns. A dog howled in some indefinite distance and direction. The birds began to twitter in the trees of the beetling woods. A creeping wind chilled the dew on the faces of sleepers and watchers in the open. The blackness grew conscious—dimly gray.

Two or three came out of the barn and ran behind it. In a moment there was a cluttered thudding of horses' feet, which died away down the field. Pickets began shooting in front. Little things whimpered and whined overhead. An officer, by the glimmer of his straps, went forward and shouted in the woods. The near firing stopped, or most of it, but the things overhead continued to whimper and whine. The lumps on the grass began to sit up and strip off blankets.

"What's he stopping 'em for?"

"Nothing in it."

"The Johnnies keep it up."

"They're firing high."

Fires of gathered dead-wood sprang up on the woods' edge—a score in sight, then a hundred, smoking and crackling. A low murmur, a sense of multitude, grew as the darkness lifted its oppression. Men sipped and munched by the fires. Some one shouted, "Get ready, men!" A cannon belched and bellowed on the hill to the right, then another and another, to a passionate, throbbing roar.

"Company B, forward! Halt here!"

Men poured around in crowds and formed in triple lines. A shell dropped through the roof of the empty barn and splintered some of the boards outward with its burst.

The misty sky was breaking for a clear day. Red clouds of sunrise streamed like pennants in the southwest. A man in the front line pitched forward and lay still.

"Who's that?"

"I do' know."

"Aiken, I guess."

"There, now! You jabbed me twice. Hold up your bayonet."

Men panted as if they had already been running, and shifted their feet nervously.

"To-day's my birthday."

"Going to celebrate it all right."

Several laughed in high, strained cackles.

"What we waiting for, cap'n?"

"Don't know. Here. Where's your cartridge-belt? Stay where you are. Who's that down? Hand up his belt."

A shout came up the line, like the ripple of a shaken rope. They were suddenly in the woods. Men jumped from the ground and joined. They were in another field of grass. One heard nothing more but the thump of his own feet and the singing blood in his ears; not the throb of the artillery; not the cry of the man who threw up his arms and fell against him; not the discharge of his own rifle, though he saw the smoke, and with the next stride his face went through the smoke.

It was easy running in the grass, the long, level fields, a fence now and then, a stone wall; but then came a slope and ploughed ground, where one stumbled and fell with his face in the brown dirt, and fancied himself hit in the pit of the stomach—only, why not dead?—saw the lines gone on; got up, and ran after to the edge of a field of standing corn. A fenced road was beyond, a white building with a central, squat chimney, overhung by heavy woods full of smoke. The lower part of the smoke bellied forward, jumped, and trembled at the edge.

There seemed to be singularly few in the running line now. One seemed, in fact, to be running back unaccountably, down the slope and the ploughed ground, into another triple line, a surf of guns, caps, hot faces, and innumerable legs. One seemed to be caught up and rushed back, ploughed ground and slope, and lined up at the top, there loading and firing across the corn. Comparatively it was restful, mechanical. To find one's cartridge-belt empty at last was a disappointment. It seemed to imply the need of doing something else, something new and untried. The smoke in the woods ahead was thinner.

"I guess Johnnie's belt's empty, too."

"I guess we're going in to see. Here we go!"

They ran into the corn. One did not feel military—rather, happy-go-lucky. The enemy behind the fence and in the road all ran away to the woods, where there seemed nothing much going on. It looked like a gaping mouth, the tree-trunks like black teeth, and the smoke from the blacker throat drifted between the teeth. It seemed to have sucked in its hot breath and red tongue—to be waiting. The fence was nearly reached when it let go a thousand red tongues, a voice that crashed, a breath that was hot and smoky, that jumped and trembled. One dropped behind the fence and felt for cartridges.

"Hi, Jimmie! Going to get out o' this."

"Close up, men. Steady there."

"That's the colonel."

"Yep."

"Draw them off, now. Steady. Close up."

"Belts, boys—look for belts."

They went back slowly, stripping the cartridge-belts from men fallen between the corn-hills, and firing at the smoke; into the grass, at length, and at length to a halt in cover of broken fence and line of weeds, hard by the woods they had left at dawn. The enemy spread over the cornfield. One seemed to resent it on account of owning that cornfield with a more than ancestral heritage. There were fresh columns coming up on the right. The broken brigades in the grass watched them pass. Their line mounted and stood still on the ridge, outlined against the woods and volleying evenly. Gaps opened and closed. Some one said, "They're old troops." They went into the corn with a rush. Whatever happened, it sounded like an explosion of a half-hour's length, and after it the cornfield and ploughed land were empty, except for the smoke, and the wounded and dead, some hidden in the corn, some seen against the brown fallow.

The mouth of the black woods gaped; there were its black teeth and drifting breath. Fragments of the columns were drawing off to the covert of a bulge of woods on the right. That part of the battle stood still. The sun was half-way up the sky.

"I fought, cap'n! I wasn't afraid!"

He had red, downy cheeks, an indistinct nose, and white eyelashes.

"Terrible warrior you are, Jimmie. Your fingers are dripping."

Jimmie looked at his hand. A little red brook ran down the palm. He turned white and sick.

"Scratched, Jimmie. Tie it up for him."

"I never seen it," in an awed voice.

The officer went on.

"Get your breath. See your guns are all right. What's that?"

The man sat staring at his wrecked and twisted rifle. Another man laughed hoarsely.

"Scrap-iron he picked up."

"'Tain't, either"—angrily. "It's my rifle. Been holding it all day. What's gone with it? Something hit it."

It had been shattered in his hands by a flying missile.

Some one rode up whom the captain saluted.

"How many left here?"

"About forty."

"Colonel Morley?"

"In the cornfield."

"Major Cutting?"

"All right, sir, over there."

"How are your men?"

"Pretty fair, sir. They'll go in again."

A mile down the valley the fight was growing hotter; a ravine was full of smoke, a jam around a bridge, a line of blue hills beyond; up nearer, columns were massing by a sunken road, under batteries playing from opposite hills across the creek; a village lay to the west. The sun made another jump up the sky. The fields around were empty, except for the lines in covert behind the fences, and here and there a horseman galloping, here and there a horse but no horseman. The enemy were in the corn again, shooting intermittently. Smoke drifted up and turned white against the glistening blue. The batteries beyond the woods on the right broke out again. New clouds of smoke floated overhead and dimmed the sun. In the grass-fields still the crouched lines waited in covert of weeds and fences. Hours that had shot past in the charge, the struggle and retreat, now stretched like sleepless nights. Company B muttered and swore.

"What's the use of waiting?"

"Le's go in!"

The captain and lieutenant lay at a distance on the grass. Neither of them answered. Jimmie felt around his belt.

"I got fifteen cartridges."

"How's your scratch, Jimmie?"

"Ho, I don' care for that. Why don' we fight some more?"

The captain said, "Do you hear those minie-balls?"

The lieutenant, "What of them?"

"The pitch, of course; they go from E flat to F, and then drop to D. That's a very pretty interval."

"You've got an ear! They do sort of go up and down."

"Le's fight some more."

"Oh, Jimmie, dry up!"

High noon over the corn, and the woods, and the white building with the squat chimney.

Jimmie again. "Le's fight so—Oh!"

He leaped, flung up his hands and fell—his rifle clattering behind—his head rolled over once and lay still. The man next him lifted Jimmie's head, laid it down gently and turned away. Some one farther along said, "Pshaw!" One still farther, "Who's that?"—"Jimmie"—"Oh!"

The captain took the rifle and belt with fifteen counted cartridges and walked down the line to the man with the shattered rifle.

"Here you are."

Company B was silent, and crouched more closely. The sun slipped down perceptibly and burned red in the smoke. The throb of the unseen guns grew Quicker. From woods' edge and cornfield, from covered lines in the weeds by zigzag fences, the smoke was living and leaping, Company B busy and interested. A horseman clattered by. "Get ready!"

"Bayonets?"

"All right. Get into it now!"

Grass-fields, fences, and ploughed ground; all voices of the battle-field awake; yelling and cheering, crash of musketry, crack of rifles, roar of guns, shells that whooped in flight and burst into a score of individual screams. Beneath all, an undertone, a rumbling, grinding, splintering sound, the organ bass of the field; into the corn, that rustled as before, that brushed in turn against Northern and Southern faces, that sheltered alike from the slant sun all still faces in the furrows, pale and ghastly and grimed, thick together, piled dead over dead. Then came the fence, the road, the squat-chimneyed building, the gaping woods with black teeth and white breath; and Company B. Reg. Third, went into the wished-for woods at last, with empty belts and point-on bayonets; went through them, and saw the sun beyond, and broken lines running across open fields. Some thirty of them came back and sat down by the white building gloomily. The captain looked them over and hummed. "The Campbells are coming—trala, trala." The sun dropped low. The throb of the guns down the valley grew slower, duller, fainter. Sanitary men with stretchers pushed to and fro in the corn. The woods grew dark, the fields dusky. Campfires crackled beside the road, Company B's by the white building. Tin cups were poked into the coals. Conversation was grumbling, fragmentary.

"Jimmie's shut down on pretty sudden."

"Jimmie! There's fifty better men out of this company dropped in their tracks! I don't see why you're so cut on Jimmie."

"I wished it was some one else." The speaker's voice broke. "He was such a damn fool."

"Oh, I see."

"Know the name of that creek?"

"No."

"It's the Antietam."

"What of it? It ain't the Wyantenaug, that's all I care."

"And this thing's a Dunker church."

"You got more useless information 'n would set up a college."

"Pennsylvania fellow told me over there Dunkers are sort of Dutch Baptists."

"Oh, go get some wood!"

The captain was in the road. He walked over and leaned on the splintered fence and watched the red lights of a hundred little fires play ghostly games with black shadows in the foliage of the woods. Men were pushing about in the corn, rustling the blades. The stars were out, the young moon setting slim and lovely with the old moon on her arm. The distant crackle of rifles, belated fragments of the battle, seemed futile, isolated, mistaken and sad in the light of the drooping, withdrawing moon.

Fifty feet away was a large camp-fire of fence rails. Of the men about it, one had lean, long limbs and face, wore a long black coat and black slouched hat, and talked continuously in solemn, flowing bass. The rest listened, absorbed. Now and then one of them laughed.

The captain drew near. The lean talker unfolded his legs and rose.

"Gods! The anchorite? Gentlemen, who might this be?"

"Cap'n Windham, Company B," said some one.

"He hath grown a beard! In complete steel, revisits the glimpses of the moon! A Hotspur of the North, will kill him six or seven dozen Confederates before breakfast and say, 'Fie on this quiet life!' Will tootle a reed no more! Will dive into the bottom of the deep, pluck up drowned honor by the locks, and call it vanity! Vat for a fool of a musician!"

"How are you, Jack?"

"A war correspondent I, John Roland Mavering, who will celebrate you, a Homer to Achilles, who wants to know for his invocation how you happen not to be dead."

They locked arms and sauntered along the road in leisurely pursuit of the moon.