Time and again the general's diminutive orderly would ride to Colonel Flint to inquire if any news had been heard, and to talk with the old men of Company "C" about his chum. There were two drawbacks to this. It began to bore Flint, who felt a trifle jealous of the praises sung of Stark, and it gave the New-Englanders abundant opportunity to chaff the lad about his old friends, the Fire Zouaves, whose conduct or misconduct at Bull Run was the subject of the derision of the "steady" regiments of the army. It wasn't that the "b'hoys" lacked nerve, stamina, courage. They had lost their soldierly little colonel, shot dead by a fanatic the very day they entered Alexandria. There was no one to discipline them, with Ellsworth gone, and the bravest men in the world are of no account in battle except when acting in disciplined unison. Other regiments ran down that hill as hard as did the Fire Zouaves, and without half the provocation; but everybody pitched on the red shirts and made them the scapegoats because they had come with such a tremendous swagger and had boasted so much. Shorty believed in his old friends and stood up for them, and lost his temper and said things to the New-Englanders in turn that they didn't like. "How came it that you could stand and see your major down with a dozen rebs around him and make no effort at rescue?" he demanded, and this was a home thrust that made many men wince, and at last it leaked out somehow, as such things will, that none of the left wing saw or heard of it until too late. The smoke was thick. They were falling back as ordered, but the senior captain had been wounded and sent to the rear. Flint was acting as wing commander, and when two companies on the right begged their officers, after the confusion, to let them rush back and bring off the major, Flint himself refused. "We have lost far more now than our share," he said, "and the general orders us back." And still there lived among the New-Englanders that abiding faith that the honored major was not dead and would yet be heard from. "And when he is," said Shorty, "you can bet your buttons Snipe and Sergeant Keating will prove to be the ones that pulled him out, and they were firemen." The fact of the matter is that Shorty was getting "too big for his boots," as Colonel Flint began to say. He was indulged and spoiled to such an extent by guards and sentries around Chain Bridge, greeted so cordially by generals and colonels, and hailed with such confident familiarity by the line, that the youngster's head was probably not a little inflated. He was getting "cheeky," said a spectacled adjutant-general of a neighboring brigade. "He talks too much," said staff-officers about their own head-quarters. "He'll run up against somebody some day that'll take the shine off him if he isn't more careful with that big horse of his," said a certain few, who hated a horseman on general principles; and this proved a true prediction.