The fight was over only in degree. Our brigade was drawing away into the north and the enemy were pressing revengefully after them. Our hundreds of prisoners and our few wounded were being taken back eastward over the road by which we had come in the night, and even after we had turned into it I saw a Yankee shell kill a wounded man and his horse not thirty yards from me.

Before we had gone another mile I met Harry Helm. The General had left him in camp with flat orders to remain, but at daylight he had ridden out to find us. He was in two tremendous moods at once; lifted to heaven on the glory of our deeds, yet heart-broken over the fate of Ned Ferry. "Surgeon\'s told him he can\'t live, Dick! And all the effect that\'s had--\'No opiates, then, Doctor,\' s\'e, \'till I get off these two or three despatches.\' So there he lies in that ambulance cross-questioning prisoners and making everybody bring him every scrap of information, as if he were General Austin and Major Harper rolled into one and they were wounded instead of him--By George! Dick, he knows you\'re hit and just how you\'re hit, and has sent me to find you!"

I said I thought I could gallop if Harry could, and in a few minutes we were up with the ambulance. It had stopped. There were several men about it, including Sergeant Jim and Kendall, which two had come from Quinn, and having just been in the ambulance, at Ferry\'s side, were now remounting, both of them openly in tears. "Hello, Kendall."

"Hello, Smith." He turned sharply from me, horse and all.

"Good-morning, sergeant, is Lieutenant Ferry--worse?"

The sergeant only jabbed in the spurs, and leapt away with Kendall, bearing despatches to the brigade. Harry, looking back to me from the ambulance, called softly, "All right again; it was only a bad swoon!"

"Hello, Smith," said some one whom I was too sick and dizzy to recognize, "one of those prisoners says he saw Oliver dead."

They say two or three men sprang to catch me, but the first thing I knew was that the ambulance was under way and I in it on my back within elbow-touch of Ferry, looking up into a surgeon\'s face. "How\'s the Lieutenant?" I asked.

"Oh--getting on, getting on," he replied. Doctors think patients are fools.

In a parlor under the room where Charlotte lay they made a bed for Ferry and one for me, and here, lapped in luxury and distinction, I promptly fell asleep, and when I reopened my eyes it was again afternoon. In the other bed Ferry was slumbering, and quite across the room, beside a closed door, sat Cécile and Camille. The latter tiptoed to me. Her whispers were as soft as breathing, and when I answered or questioned, her ear sank as near as you would put a rose to smell it. "The Lieutenant, sleeping? yes, this hour past; surgeons surprised and more hopeful. Miss Estelle? in another room with other wounded. Her aunt? upstairs with Charlotte, who was--oh--getting on, getting on." That made me anxious.

"Does Charlotte," I asked, "know--everything?"

Camille ............