His neighbour looked curiously at him, unprepared for the sudden change, while from Ephraim came again the warning whisper, ‘Hold up, Luce!’
Recovering himself, Lucius turned and laughed in Ephraim’s face. ‘I was thinking of Blue Bag just then,’ he muttered.
Utterly taken aback by this singular statement, Ephraim weakly ejaculated, ‘Oh!’ and finding nothing more to say, relapsed into silence.
Sergeant Pierce stepped through the broken file to the front, and stooping down, picked up the rifles from the road and removed the belts with their ammunition pouches from the two dead men.
‘Hyar, yew two “Terrors,”’ he said, ‘ketch hold on these. Yew can’t say yew haven’t got anything to fight with now. I thought it wouldn’t be long before yew war provided.’ Lucius received the rifle and belt with a little giggle which he could not entirely suppress. He was feeling strangely light and cheerful. Tragedy was turning to comedy. He was wearing the clothes of one dead man; why should he not receive the arms of another? He longed to speak, to say something—anything. He had the greatest difficulty in repressing a hilarious shout of ‘Hi! Grizzly, isn’t it a joke—two young Rebs asked to shoot their own men?’ His feelings found vent at last in the admonitory remark to Pierce, ‘Mind you keep your eye on us, sergeant.’
The air was full of flying missiles, but Lucius no longer ducked his head. He seemed not to hear them. The sergeant looked down at him from his superior height and grinned. ‘I guess we misjudged yew,’ he said. ‘Yew’re’—— He stopped suddenly. The pupils of his eyes, still fixed upon Lucius, dilated; the upper lip, drawn up by the action of the genial smile, drooped down upon the lower in a pout. For an instant his sturdy frame kept its position, martial and erect to the last, and then without a word or a groan he fell dead, shot through the heart.
Lucius looked at him and did not blench, but his neighbour growled discontentedly, ‘This air gitting too hot, I guess. Ain’t we never tew git the word to fire?’ Then that man, too, fell suddenly dead. It was, as he had said, getting remarkably hot. All at once on the crest of the heights three more batteries appeared, the black-muzzled cannon grinning down upon the village. But the guns were silent, though the cannoneers stood beside them, ready to teach them their one deadly monosyllable. They were waiting for something. What was it? Ah! here it comes.