Almost before they had lost sight of the spires of the city, Arnold, with braying bugles, marched his column down the echoing streets, and set up the standard of the republic where late the British lion had wooed the wind. For nearly a week that long train crept on its way, held back by its own cumbersome weight and the varying roughness of the route. And ever on its flank hung the lean but resolute army of the Continentals, waiting and longing for a chance to strike. All the suffering of Valley Forge was to be avenged. Every wrong they had sustained was whispering at their ears and tugging at their memories; every dead comrade seemed calling out to them for retribution through the sunshine or the midnight silence. And it should be theirs; the utmost atonement that arms, nerved with patriotic and personal vengeance, could achieve should be claimed--if only the hour would come. But still that long train moved onward, and there came no word to fight. Then, from out the blue sky-reaches of that June-time dawned Monmouth day. "We are to fight at last!" And every man in that thin, dishevelled line felt his heart throb with the exultation of action long desired and long delayed. Every man but one, and he the one on whom rested the responsibility of the attack. "Anybody but Lee!" Dunn had said with a groan, when he heard who was to lead the attacking column. And Richard, having gone with him to report some scouting work to the council of officers, and recalling Lee's fierce opposition to any plan for battle, groaned too. "His envy of General Washington and his imprisonment among the British have made him half Tory. He is the senior officer, it is true,--but if he had only persisted in his first refusal to lead the division and left it to La Fayette!" But in Richard's thoughts there was no time for doubt when, in the brilliant light of the next morning, he swept with his column over the brow of the low hill and on down the narrow valley toward the scarlet line that marked Clinton's post. It was his first real battle; for compared with this the engagements under Sumter had been but skirmishes, and the frenzy of the fight was upon him. "For home and Joscelyn!" had been the war-cry he had set himself, thinking to carry into the hottest of every fray the memory-presence of the girl whom he loved. But when the test came she was forgotten, and only the menace ahead, the death he was rushing to meet, was remembered. Every musket along that steadfast scarlet line seemed levelled at him alone, and into his heart there flashed a momentary wish to turn and seek shelter in flight from the leaping fire of the deadly muzzles. But in the quick onset, the shouts, the growl of the guns, and the challenging call of the bugles, this fear was conquered; and in its place a wild, unreasoning delirium seized upon him, and the one thought of which he was conscious was to kill, kill, kill!