“They didn’t send us support and we couldn’t hold the hill, but we toted you back with us.” “The battle?” asked Dad in sudden anxiety. “It lasted till after dark. We didn’t know who had won. Nobody did. “But next morning Lee was gone. Helter-skelter back across the Potomac into Virginia again. Invasion busted up for good. “Some of the fellers say the folks in Washington are giving Little Mac blazes for letting Lee get back safe into Virginia instead of catching him before he could get to the Potomac. But I kind of guess it would have been just a little bit like catching a rattlesnake by the tail. “Anyhow, campaign’s over, and Johnnie Reb won’t stable his horses in Faneuil Hall _this_ trip. Say, Dad, they’re talking a whole lot about you everywhere--about how you--” The boy checked himself. Through sheer weakness Dad had fallen asleep. CHAPTER XXXIV THE MAN AT WASHINGTON Dad sat in the late September sunlight at the door of the hospital tent where for ten days he had lain. Slowly, but very surely, the old, wiry strength was beginning to creep back to the lean body. No longer did the slightest sudden motion or an effort to concentrate his thoughts set his head to aching blindly, and no longer did his knees buckle under him when he tried to cross the tent from bed to door. Dad was well out of danger, the surgeons said. Nothing but a few more days of rest was needed to bring him back to health. An injury to the head is always dangerous, but it has this redeeming quality--it does not long keep its victim in suspense. It kills, crazes, or gets entirely well in an unbelievably short time. The issue is settled, one way or another, in far less time than in the case of an equally severe wound in any other part of the anatomy. The campaign was over. The Confederate army, back in its lair, was licking the grievous wounds sustained in the Antietam fight. The Army of the Potomac, nearly thirteen thousand of its soldiers dead from that same fight, was resting on its doubtful laurels. Here and there skirmish parties or small detachments of the rival forces were in motion, but between the main bodies of both armies brooded the truce of exhaustion. The Federals that summer and early fall had invaded Virginia, and after a series of fearful defeats had been driven out. Lee in September had invaded the North, and had met with like fate. The season was too far advanced for any more extensive operations, and a lull came. Almost directly after Antietam’s battle President Lincoln had electrified the world by issuing the so-called “Provisional Proclamation,” declaring in effect that slavery within the limits of the United States was forever dead, and that every negro in America was henceforth a human being, not a piece of transferable property. Three months later the more formal “Emancipation Proclamation” was to follow. But its forerunner, the provisional proclamation, quite as effectively struck the slavery shackles from a million wrists.