The hot August sun poured its fiercest rays down upon the heaps of dead and wounded in this forest cockpit, and turned into golden haze the mist of smoke encircling it. Through this pale veil we saw, from time to time, forms struggling in the dusk of the thicket beyond. Behind each tree-trunk was the stage whereon a life-drama was being played, with a sickening and tragic sameness in them all. The yeoman from his cover would fire; if he missed, forth upon him would dart the savage, raised hatchet gleaming--and there would be a widow the more in some one of our Valley homes. "Put two men behind each tree," ordered keen-eyed Herkimer. "Then, when one fires, the other's gun will be loaded for the Indian on his running forward." After this command had been followed, the battle went better for us. There was a hideous fascination in this spectacle stretched before us. An hour ago it had been so softly peaceful, with the little brook picking its clean way in the sunlight through the morass, and the kingfisher flitting among the willows, and the bees' drone laying like a spell of indolence upon the heated air. Now the swale was choked with corpses! The rivulet ran red with blood, and sluggishly spread its current around barriers of dead men. Bullets whistled across the gulf, cutting off boughs of trees as with a knife, and scattering tufts of leaves like feathers from a hawk stricken in its flight. The heavy air grew thick with smoke, dashed by swift streaks of dancing flame. The demon-like screams of the savages, the shouts and moans and curses of our own men, made hearing horrible. Yes--horrible is the right word! A frightened owl, I remember, was routed by the tumult from its sleepy perch, and flew slowly over the open space of the ravine. So curious a compound is man!--we watched the great brown-winged creature flap its purblind way across from wood to wood, and speculated there, as we stood in the jaws of death, if some random ball would hit it! I am writing of all this as if I did nothing but look about me while others fought. Of course that could not have been the case. I recall now these fragmentary impressions of the scene around me with a distinctness and with a plenitude of minutiae which surprise me, the more that I remember little enough of what I myself did. But when a man is in a fight for his life there are no details. He is either to come out of it or he isn't, and that is about all he thinks of.