Some in the new skirmish lines were beginning to fire
at various shadows discerned in the vapour, forms
of men suddenly revealed by some humour of the laggard
masses of clouds. The crackle of musketry began
to dominate the purring of the hostile bullets.
Dan, in the front rank, held his rifle poised, and
looked into the fog keenly, coldly, with the air of
a sportsman. His nerves were so steady that it
was as if they had been drawn from his body, leaving
him merely a muscular machine; but his numb heart
was somehow beating to the pealing march of the fight.
The waving skirmish line went backward and forward,
ran this way and that way. Men got lost in the
fog, and men were found again. Once they got
too close to the formidable ridge, and the thing burst
out as if repulsing a general attack. Once another
blue regiment was apprehended on the very edge of
firing into them. Once a friendly battery began
an elaborate and scientific process of extermination.
Always as busy as brokers, the men slid here and there
over the plain, fighting their foes, escaping from
their friends, leaving a history of many movements
in the wet yellow turf, cursing the atmosphere, blazing
away every time they could identify the enemy.
In one mystic changing of the fog as if the fingers
of spirits were drawing aside these draperies, a small
group of the grey skirmishers, silent, statuesque,
were suddenly disclosed to Dan and those about him.
So vivid and near were they that there was something
uncanny in the revelation.
There might have been a second of mutual staring.
Then each rifle in each group was at the shoulder.
As Dan’s glance flashed along the barrel of
his weapon, the figure of a man suddenly loomed as
if the musket had been a telescope. The short
black beard, the slouch hat, the pose of the man as
he sighted to shoot, made a quick picture in Dan’s
mind. The same moment, it would seem, he pulled
his own trigger, and the man, smitten, lurched forward,
while his exploding rifle made a slanting crimson
streak in the air, and the slouch hat fell before the
body. The billows of the fog, governed by singular
impulses, rolled between.
“You got that feller sure enough,” said
a comrade to Dan. Dan looked at him absent-mindedly.
V
When the next morning calmly displayed another fog,
the men of the regiment exchanged eloquent comments;
but they did not abuse it at length, because the streets
of the town now contained enough galloping aides to
make three troops of cavalry, and they knew that they
had come to the verge of the great fight.
Dan conversed with the man who had once possessed
a horse-hair trunk; but they did not mention the line
of hills which had furnished them in more careless
moments with an agreeable topic. They avoided
it now as condemned men do the subject of death, and
yet the thought of it stayed in their eyes as they
looked at each other and talked gravely of other things.
Copyrights
The Little Regiment from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
