This day, the tenth of July, the Second Corps marched twenty miles. The day was one of the hottest of a hot summer. Not the lightest zephyr lifted a leaf or dried the sweat on a soldier’s brow. The dust of the Georgetown Pike rose thick and stifling until it made a broad and deep and thick and stifling cloud. There was little water to be had throughout the day. The Second Corps suffered profoundly. That night it lay in the fields by the roadside near Rockville. The night was smoking hot, and the men lay feverishly, moving their limbs and sighing, troubled with dreams. The bugles sounded under a copper dawn and they rose to an eleventh of July, hot, dust-clogged, and thirsty as had been the tenth. There were sunstrokes this day, exhaustion from heat, a trail of involuntary stragglers, men limping in the rear, men sitting, head on knees, beneath the powdered wayside growth, men lying motionless in the ditch beside the road. Horses fell and died. There were many delays. But through all heat, great weariness, and suffering, Early, shrill-voiced and determined, urged the troops on upon the road to Washington. The troops responded. Something less than eight thousand muskets moved in the great dust of the pike, forty guns, and ahead, the four small cavalry brigades of McCausland, Imboden, W.L. Jackson, and Bradley Johnson. “— —!” said Early. “If we can’t take it, at least we can give it a quaking fit!—increase the peace clamour! It’s worth while to see if we can get to the outer fortifications before they pour their — — numbers into them!” The Second Corps marched fast, now by the Silver Spring Road, Imboden’s cavalry ahead, Jackson’s on the flank, full before them Fort Stevens, very visible in the distance, Washington. The men moistened their lips, talked, for all the dust in their throats, the blood beating in their temples, and the roaring in their ears. “Take it! Could we take it?”—“By supernal luck—a chance in a million—if they were all asleep or dazed!”—“Take it and end the war—O God, if we could!”—“Run up the Stars and Bars—Play ‘Dixie’ everywhere—Live! at last live after four years of being born!”—“Take Washington—eight thousand of us and the cavalry and the twelve-pounder Napoleons—” From the front broke out a long crackling fire. “Cavalry in touch—cavalry in touch.” Rodes’s division, leading, came into line of battle. As it did so rose in the south between Fort Stevens and the city a great dust cloud. “— —!” said Early. “There isn’t a plan or a cannon numbers won’t spike!—_Skirmishers to the front!_”