THE regiment trotted in double time along the street, and the
colonel seemed to quarrel over the right of way with many artillery
officers. Batteries were waiting in the mud, and the men of them,
exasperated by the bustle of this ambitious infantry, shook their
fists from saddle and caisson, exchanging all manner of taunts and
jests. The slanted guns continued to look reflectively at the
ground.
On the outskirts of the crumbled town a fringe of blue figures
were firing into the fog. The regiment swung out into skirmish
lines, and the fringe of blue figures departed, turning their backs
and going joyfully around the flank.
The bullets began a low moan off toward a ridge which loomed
faintly in the heavy mist. When the swift crescendo had reached
its climax, the missiles zipped just overhead, as if piercing an
invisible curtain. A battery on the hill was crashing with such
tumult that it was as if the guns had quarrelled and had fallen
pell-mell and snarling upon each other. The shells howled on their
journey toward the town. From short-range distance there came a
spatter of musketry, sweeping along an invisible line and making
faint sheets of orange light.
Some in the new skirmish lines were beginning to fire at
various shadows discerned in the vapor, forms of men suddenly
revealed by some humor 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
gray
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.
