"The Fourth Mississippi--where is the Fourth Mississippi?" "Here is the Fortieth Alabama's standard--rally men to your standard!" "Where is General Cleburne, men? Who has seen General Cleburne?" "Up, boys, and let us at 'em agin! Damn 'em, they've wounded me an' I want to kill some more!"
"Water!--water--for God's sake give us water!" This came from a pile of wounded men just under the guns on the Columbia pike. It came from a sixteen year old boy in blue. Four dead comrades lay across him.
"And this is the curse of it," said General Travis, as he rode among the men.
But suddenly amid the smoke and confusion, the soldiers saw what many thought was an apparition--an old, old warrior, on a horse with black mane and tail and fiery eyes, but elsewhere covered with white sweat and pale as the horse of death. The rider's face too, was deadly white, but his keen eyes blazed with the fire of many generations of battle-loving ancestors.
The soldiers flocked round him, half doubting, half believing. The terrible ordeal of that bloody night's work; the poignant grief from beholding the death and wounds of friends and brothers; the weird, uncanny groans of the dying upon the sulphurous-smelling night air; the doubt, uncertainty, and yet, through it all, the bitter realization that all was in vain, had shocked, benumbed, unsettled the nerves of the stoutest; and many of them scarcely knew whether they were really alive, confronting in the weird hours of the night ditches of blood and breastworks of death, or were really dead--dead from concussion, from shot or shell, and were now wandering on a spirit battle-field till some soul-leader should lead them away.
And so, half dazed and half dreaming, and yet half alive to its realization, they flocked around the old warrior, and they would not have been at all surprised had he told them he came from another world.
Some thought of Mars. Some thought of death and his white horse. Some felt of the animal's mane and touched his streaming flanks and cordy legs to see if it were really a horse and not an apparition, while "What is it?" and "Who is he?" was whispered down the lines.
Then the old rider spoke for the first time, and said simply: