A blazing board had come down directly in front of him. As he stood still, another came down, striking him on the unoccupied shoulder. He waited no longer, but, calculating as well as he could, made a clean leap to the bottom. Luckily he landed squarely, and, though his burden made him stagger, he did not fall. As he started for the open doorway, there was a crash, and the stairway became a thing of the past. The young major had missed death by less than five seconds. How he gained the open air, Deck could not tell afterward. The smoke was so thick he could not see, and breathing was out of the question. "Out there--help me!" he yelled, when he saw the light, and then Artie and several others ran to his aid. Two cavalrymen took the unconscious Confederate and laid him on the grass. "Deck, are you hurt?" asked the young captain, anxiously, seeing how pale the young officer was. The major could not stand upright. "Hurt? No--I'm--I'm--all right," was the answer; and then the gallant youth fainted dead away. With the wounded, he was carried on a stretcher to the nearest ambulance. Artie was permitted to go along, and Captain Abbey took command of the battalion. The Confederate was placed among the wounded of his own company. Colonel Lyon was not near the mill, and it was not until night that he heard Deck was sick. The major did not recover consciousness for an hour, and then it was found he had a fever. That night was an anxious one for both the colonel and the young captain, and the morning brought small comfort. Deck was out of his mind, and the doctor was afraid he had inhaled too much smoke, and possibly some of the flames. "The boy meant well, but he overdid the matter," said Colonel Lyon, sadly. "I warned him over and over again to be more careful; but he was too anxious to make a record for himself to listen to me. If anything happens to him, what will his mother and the others say?" CHAPTER XIII AN ADVANCE ALL ALONG THE LINE General Bragg, the Confederate commander, had established his headquarters at Tullahoma, but his troops lay some twenty or thirty miles to the north of that town, in a grand semicircle extending from Wartrace on the east, through Shelbyville to Columbia on the west. The troops numbered about forty thousand, of all sorts, according to the commander's own report, and a larger portion of them were sheltered behind hastily constructed intrenchments.