第84章

"Halt! Go back," commanded a hoarse voice in front of her, which was accompanied with the clicking of a gunlock."Ye can't pass heah.""Lemme pass, Mister," she pleaded."I'm on'y a gal, with medicine fur my mammy, an' I'm powerful anxious ter git home.""No, ye can't git out heah.Orders are strict; besides, ef ye did the Yankees 'd cotch ye.They're jest out thar."She became aware that there were heavy lines of men lying near, and fearing to say another word, she turned and rode away to the left.She became entagled with a cavalry company moving toward the extreme Union right, and riding with it several hundred yards, turned off into a convenient grove just as the light began to be sufficient to distinguish her from a trooper.She was now, she was sure, outside of the Rebel lines, but she had gone far to the south, where the two lines were wide apart.The Union fifes and drums, now sounding what seemed an unsuspicous and cheerful reveille, were apparently at least a mile away.It was growing lighter rapidly, and every passing moment was fraught with the weightiest urgency.

She concentrated all her energies for a supreme effort, and lashed her mare forward over the muddy cotton-field.The beast's hoofs sank in the loose red loam, as if it were quicksand, and her pace was maddeningly slow.At last Rachel came in sight of a Union camp at the edge of a cedar thicket.The arms were stacked, the men were cooking breakfast, and a battery of cannon standing near had no horses attached.

Rachel beat the poor mare's flanks furiously, and shouted.

"Turn out! The Rebels are coming! The Rebels are coming!"Her warning came too late.Too late, also, came that of the pickets, who were firing their guns and rushing back to camp before an awful wave of men that had rolled out of the cedars on the other side of the cotton field.

A hundred boisterous drums were now making the thickets ring with the "long roll." Rachel saw the men in front of her leave their coffee-making, rush to the musket stacks and take their places in line.In another minute they were ordered forward to the fence in front of them, upon which they rested their muskets.Rachel rode through their line and turned around to look.The broad cotton field was covered with solid masses of Rebels, rushing forward with their peculiar fierce yell.

"Fire!" shouted the Colonel in front of her.The six field-pieces to her right split her ears with their crash.A thousand muskets blazed out a fire that withered the first line of the advancing foe.Another crash, and the Rebels had answered with musketry and artillery, that tore the cedars around her, sent the fencerails flying into the air, and covered the ground with blue-coats.Her faithful mare shied, caught her hoof in a crack in the limestone, and fell with a broken leg.

So began that terrible Wednesday, December 31, 1862.

Bragg's plan of battle was very simple.Rosencrans had stretched out a long thin wing through the cedars to the right of the pike.

At the pike it was very strong, but two miles away it degenerated into scattered regiments, unskilfully disposed.Bragg threw against these three or four to one, with all the fury of the Southern soldier in the onset.The line was crumbled, and before noon crushed back to the pike.

Rachel disengaged herself from her fallen steed, and leaning against a sapling, watched the awful collision.She forgot the great danger in the fascination of the terrible spectacle.She thought she had seen men scale the whole gamut of passion, but their wildest excesses were tame and frothy beside this ecstacy of rage in the fury of battle.The rustic Southerners whom she had seen at ball-play, the simple-hearted Northerners whom she had alarmed at their coffee-making, were now transformed into furies mad with the delirium of slaughter, and heedless of their own lives in the frenzy of taking those of others.

"You had better run back, young woman," said some one touching her elbow."The whole line's going to fall back.We're flanked."A disorderly stream of men, fragments of the shattered right, caught her in its rush, and she was borne back to the open fields lying along the pike.There, as when a turbulent river empties into a bay, the force of the current subsided, and she was dropped like silt.The cowardly ones, hatless and weaponless, ran off toward the pike, but the greater portion halted, formed in line, called for their comrades to join them, and sent for more cartridges.

Almost dropping with fatigue, Rachel made her way to a pile of cracker-boxes by an Osage-orange hedge, on a knoll, and sat down.

Some fragments of hard-bread, dropped on the trampled sod while rations were being issued, lay around.She was so hungry that she picked up one or two that were hardly soiled, and nibbled them.

The dreadful clamor of battle grew louder continually.The musketry had swollen into a sullen roar, with the artillery pulsating high above it.Crashing vollies of hundreds of muskets fired at once, told of new regiments joining in the struggle.Rebel brigades raised piercing treble yells as they charged across the open fields against the Union positions.The latter responded with deep-lunged cheers, as they hurled their assailants back.Clouds of slowly curling smoke rose above thickets filled with maddened men, firing into one another's breasts.Swarms of rabbits and flocks of birds dashed out in terror from the dark coverts in which they had hitherto found security.

No gallantry could avail against such overwhelming numbers as assailed the Union right.The stream of disorganized men flowing back from the thickets became wider and swifter every minute; every minute, too, the din of the conflict came closer; every minute the tide of battle rolled on to regiments lying nearer the pike.

A Surgeon with a squad of stretcher-bearers came up to where Rachel was sitting.