Slowly the enemy crumbled. The sun struggled through the clouds and the colors shone in glorified indistinctness in a wet glitter of sunlight. It was over now. He turned his horse and rode slowly back towards the tent. “Don’t follow me,” he said, curtly. And he rode back, slowly and alone. The cry of the cannon was now triumphant and glad. A shell, whirling above him, spluttered in futile animosity. The wild cheering was music to his ears. His dream was over now--the dream he had dreamed when he longed to enlist. He flung up his arms and laughed aloud. His dream! To enlist as a private, to win patiently through grades of sergeant and lieutenant, to captain and colonel and general in command! He wearily dropped from his horse. He went into the tent. The Captain of Company Q looked down upon the General’s peaceful face. III MIDSHIPMAN JACK, U.S.N. _The Action of Appalachicola_ “I am not one of those fellows who ‘can fight and run away, and live to fight some other day,’” one of the bravest Lieutenant-Commanders in the United States navy said one evening to a party of friends, who were making him feel uncomfortable by discussing his brilliant war record. “My bad leg won’t let me run, so I always have to stand and fight it out.” “Why, Commander,” one of his friends exclaimed, “I did not know that you had a bad leg. You do not limp.” “No,” he answered, “not ordinarily. But when I tire myself I limp a little, and if I were to undertake to run I should come to grief.” “Where did you receive your injury?” another asked. “In action at Appalachicola,” the Commander replied; “the severest action I ever saw.” There was a twinkle in his eyes as he spoke, and he looked about the table to see what effect the words had upon his friends. Two of them merely muttered their sympathy, and the third asked for the story of the fight; but the fourth man looked up with a comical expression that told the Commander he was understood in one quarter at least. “You will certainly have to tell us about that,” this fourth man laughed, seeing that the Commander was waiting for a question; “for I have always understood that Appalachicola, being an out-of-the-way place, was one of the few Southern towns that escaped without a scratch in the war. I never heard of any battle there.” “No, there was no battle there,” the Commander replied, “and you would hardly hear of the action, because there were so few engaged in it. In fact, I was the only one on the Federal side, and there were no Confederates. When I was a boy there I fell out of a pine-tree and broke my thigh; so it was my own action, and one that I still have reason to remember.”