“This is no victory, general,” urged Dad, with terrible earnestness. “It was a flank movement that amounts to but one move in a big game. Our videttes reported the approach of Confederates in force beyond the hill there, you may recollect. Has--” “Bless me!” cried the young general, aghast. “I’d forgotten. In the glory of that charge I--” “In the taking of one trick you have thrown away the whole hand!” burst forth Dad in righteous wrath. “That affair at the woods was just a flank movement to distract and weaken us and later perhaps to enfilade us. “The real danger lies in front--in the force that lies between us and our main body. A force that has let us get into this trap to catch our whole demi-corps, as Jackson has done more than once with bigger detached bodies of Federals than ours in the past six months. That or drive us back into another Confederate army somewhere to the south.” “Do you--do you really think--” stammered the general, his horror making him insensible to his adviser’s tone of insubordination. “Do you--” “I think, sir, that we have one chance, and only one--to strike forward at full speed for that hill-top. The nearer we get to the summit before we come in touch with the enemy, the better our chances. “Throw the whole force ahead, letting the men who were in the charge at the woods be brought up as quickly as possible to form our rear guard. It is just one chance; but a delay will leave us no chance.” The young commander, pitiable in the fright of crass inexperience, clung metaphorically to the one stable power in sight. And then he did the one wise thing in his whole brief military career up to this point. Reading calm self-confidence in Dad’s face, he said loudly: “Captain Dadd, you are hereby appointed temporarily to my personal staff.” Under his breath he murmured: “What orders?” Readily and without change of expression Dad whispered a score of successive sentences to his chief--sentences whose technicalities the bewildered politician-general himself did not half-grasp, but which he as promptly transmitted to his couriers. In almost no time the inert body of men was buzzing with orderly activity. The front ranks--at the double, and their heavier accouterments consigned to the baggage train--were on the march, hastening eagerly toward the hill summit, the successive regiments pressing close after. “You see, sir,” Dad was explaining to the general, “it is easier to advance fifty yards toward a foe over level ground, or a hundred yards down a slope, than ten yards _up_ a hill. If we can seize and hold the crest before they reach it, it is so much net gain. “To prevent that, and to delay us further, the flank movement at the forest edge was planned. In open order, as our men are now marching, and as they must continue to march, they avoid presenting a good target to volley-fire.”