"Hurry up men!" the Colonel called. "Hurry up, let's get in there and help 'em!" A moment more and they were in it. The man beside John threw up both hands and dropped with the dull, unmistakable thud of death--the soldier who has been in battle knows the sickening sound. They were thrown around the Third Corps battery to protect their guns which had been dragged to a place more securely within the lines. Still their gunners kept falling one by one--falling ominously at the crack of a single gun in the woods. A Confederate sharpshooter had climbed a tree and was picking them off. A tall Westerner spoke to the Colonel: "Let me go huntin' for him!" The Commander nodded and John went with him--why? He asked himself the question before he had taken ten steps through the shadowy underbrush. The answer was plain. He knew the truth at once. The elemental brutal instinct of the hunter had kindled at the flash in that Westerner's eye. It would be a hunt worth while--the game was human. For five minutes they crept through the bushes hiding from tree to tree in the open spaces. They searched the tops in vain, when suddenly a piece of white oak bark fluttered down from the sky and struck the ground at their feet. The Westerner smiled at John and stood motionless: "Well, I'm damned!" They waited breathlessly, afraid to look up into the boughs of the towering oak beneath which they were standing. "Don't move now!" the man from the West cried, "and I'll pot him." Slowly he stepped backward, softly, noiselessly, his eye fixed in the treetop, his gun raised and finger on the trigger. He stopped, aimed, and fired. John looked up and saw the grey figure fall back from the tree trunk and plunge downward, bounding from limb to limb and striking the ground within ten feet of where he stood with heavy thud. The blood was gushing in red streams from his nose and mouth. They turned and hurried back to their lines--another fierce attack was being made on those guns. The men in grey charged and drove them a hundred feet before they rallied and pushed them back with frightful loss on both sides. John's Captain fell, dangerously wounded, and lay fifty feet beyond their battle line. The dry leaves in the woods had taken fire from a shell and the blaze was nearing the wounded men. The Westerner coolly leaped from his position behind a tree, walked out in a hail of lead, picked up his wounded Commander, and carried him safely to the rear. He had just stepped back to take his stand in line by John's side when a flying piece of shrapnel tore a hole in his side. He dropped to his knees, sank lower to his elbow, turned his blue eyes to the darkening sky and slowly muttered as if to himself: "Poor--little--wife--and--babies!"