Over a low swell of land some horsemen trotted into view; behind them the horizon was suddenly filled with the swimming scarlet pennons of the Lancers.  A thousand horses’ heads shot up against the sky line, manes tossing; a thousand lance points fell to a glittering level.

They were cheering shrilly as they came on; the Zouaves heard them, the gray infantry regiment gave way, turned, filed off, retreating toward the bridge at a slow trot like some baffled but dangerous animal; and after it ran the Zouaves, firing, screaming, maddened to hysteria by their first engagement, until their panting officers and their bugles together barely managed to halt them short of the edges of utter annihilation just as a full Confederate brigade rose grimly from the wood’s edge across the stream, ready to end their hysterical yelling for ever.

Stephen, sitting on the grass among the dead and stricken, tied his bloody turban, pulled the red fez close over it, smeared the blood from his eyes, and, clutching his musket, stood up unsteadily.

He could see the charge of the 8th Lancers—­see the horsemen wheel and veer wildly as they received the fire of the Confederate troops from the woods across the stream, squadron after squadron sheering off at a gallop and driving past the infantry, pell-mell, a wild riot of maddened horses, yelling riders, and streaming scarlet pennons descending in one vivid, headlong torrent to the bridge.  But the structure was already hopelessly afire; and the baffled carbineers of the advance reined up at the edge of the burning timbers and sent an angry volley after the gray infantry now jogging back into the woods beyond.  Then, suddenly, the Zouaves heard the Lancers cheering wildly in the smoke of the burning structure, but did not know what it meant.

It meant—­Berkley.

Fear had squired him that day.  When the bugles sounded through the cannon thunder and his squadron trotted out, Fear, on a paler horse than Death bestrides, cantered with him, knee to knee.  Fear’s startled eyes looked into his through the jetted smoke of musketry, through the tumult of the horses and the trumpets; Fear made his voice light and thin, so that he scarcely heard it amid the fierce cheering of his comrades, the pounding of hoofs, the futile clattering of equipments.

It was all a swift and terrible nightmare to him—­the squadrons breaking into a gallop, the woods suddenly belted with smoke, the thud and thwack of bullets pelting leather and living flesh, the frantic plunging of stricken horses, the lightning down-crash of riders hurled earthward at full speed, the brief glimpses of scarlet streaks under foot—­of a horse’s belly and agonised iron-shod feet, of a white face battered instantly into obliteration, of the ruddy smoke flowing with sparks amid which bugles rang above the clashing halt of maddened squadrons.