All winter Grant had sat before Petersburg, grim, silent, relentless, pushing here and there ever a little farther to the front, seeking the exhaustion of his enemy, waiting for the auspicious moment to let fall the blow which should lead quickly to the inevitable end. To Lee’s army looking from the heights on the tented foe in front of them by day, on the thousand camp-fires gleaming there at night, it seemed as though a ravenous monster, white-toothed, fiery-eyed, lay crouching before them, stretching out a sharp claw now and then, waiting pitilessly until the exhausted foe, weak and helpless, should fall, an easy prey, into its clutches. Surely no soldier, no army, ever held out more bravely against more fearful odds, in more desperate straits, than did this remnant of Lee’s tattered host, in its final effort to save the Confederate capital from falling into the hands of its enemies. Yet every drum-beat trembling on the soft spring air was but the knell of Richmond’s hope; every passing hour brought nearer and nearer her unavoidable doom. Late in March Grant threw out a force on his left, under Sheridan, to meet and turn, and crush if possible, Lee’s right flank, and thus precipitate the fall of Petersburg. It was at Five Forks that the two armies met and clashed in the last decisive battle of the war. Overwhelmed in front, cut off from the main column on the left, borne down upon from the rear, fighting twice its numbers on every side, the little army of Confederate veterans, with a thousand of its men already captured, and a thousand lying dead and wounded along the barricades it had so stoutly defended, broke and fled helplessly and hopelessly to the west, only the darkness of night saving it from utter annihilation at the hands of Sheridan’s pursuing cavalry. But on that field of Five Forks, after the blue-clad hosts had swept over it across the enemy’s redoubts, and only the grim harvest of battle was left, dread rows of fallen men and horses struggling and groaning among the silent dead, Rhett Bannister lay, at the edge of the White Oak road, his shoulder pierced by a minié ball, his dim eyes seeking vainly for the child of his heart. And just beyond lay Bob, stretched on the greensward, his blood-splashed face turned upward to the twilight sky, seeing nothing, knowing nothing of battle or victory, of friend or foe, deaf alike to the dying thunders of the conflict, to the exultant shouts of the victors, to the heart-stirring cry of that father who would joyously have given his own life that his son might live. CHAPTER XI THE GREAT TRAGEDY