On the right ten thousand men under Hill slipped out into line as if on dress parade--long lines of handsome boyish Southerners. The big guns above saw and found them with terrible accuracy. A wide lane of death was suddenly torn through them before they moved. They closed like clock work and with a cheer swept forward to the support of the men who were dying on the blood-soaked slope. Ned's heart was thumping now. He felt it coming, that sharp low order from the Colonel before the words rang from his lips. His hour had come for the test--coward or hero it had to be now. It was funny he had ceased to worry. He had entered a new world and this choking, blinding smoke, the steady thunder of guns, the long sheets of orange fire that flashed and flashed and blazed in three rings from the hill, the ripping canvas of musketry fire in volleys, the dull boom of the great guns on the boats below, were simply a part of the routine of the new life. He had lived a generation since dawn. The years that had gone before seemed a dream. The one real thing was Betty's laughing eyes. They were looking at him now from behind that flaming hill. He must pass those guns to reach her. Not a doubt had yet entered his soul that he would do it. Men were falling around him like leaves in autumn, but this had to be. He saw the end. No matter how fierce this battle, McClellan was only fighting to save his army from annihilation. Lee was destroying him. The order came at last. The Colonel walked along in front of his men with bared head. "Now, boys,--that battery on the first crest--we've half their men--charge and take those guns!" The regiment leaped to their feet and started up the hill. They had lost two hundred men in their first sweep. There were six hundred left. "Hold your fire until I give the word!" the Colonel shouted. The smoke was hanging low, and they had made two hundred yards before the blue line saw them through the haze. The hill blazed and hissed in their faces. The massed infantry behind the guns found their marks. Men dropped right and left, sank in grey heaps or fell forward on their faces--some were knocked backwards down the slope. Yet without a pause they climbed. Three hundred yards more and they would be on the guns. And then a sheet of blinding flame from every black-mouthed gun in line double shotted with grape and canister! The regiment was literally knocked to its knees. The men paused as if dazed by the shock. The sharp words of cheer and command from their officers and they rallied. From both flanks poured a murderous hail of bullets--guns to the right, left and front, all screaming, roaring, hissing their call of blood.