knew that for the demonstration of regular soldiers, firing at the word,--then ensued another, and again only a patter of dropping shots. She wondered that her companions did not overtake her--she must find them--she must rejoin them,--when suddenly an object started up from the side of the road, the sight of which palsied her every muscle. A man it was who had lain in the bushes on the hillside, a man so covered with blood that he had lost every semblance of humanity. The blood still came in a steady stream from his mouth, impelled in jets, as if it were under the impulse of a pump, and he held his hand to his stomach, whence too there came blood, dripping down from his fingers. In sickened, aghast dismay she watched his approach, and as he passed she found her voice and called to him to stop,--might she not help him stanch his wounds? His staring eyes gazed vacantly forward with no recognition of the meaning of her words, and he walked deliriously on, every step sending the blood forward, draining the vital currents to exhaustion. Now she dared not turn, she could not pass that hideous apparition. She shuddered and trembled and rode irresolutely forward, just to be moving--hardly with a realized intention. Suddenly the road curved, and the scene of the conflict was before her. The woods were dense on three sides of a wide stretch of fields that were springing green with new verdure; a portion had even been ploughed and bedded up for cotton; here and there lay strange objects in curious attitudes, which she did not at once recognize as slain men. Among them were scattered carbines, horses already dead, and more than one in scrambling agonies of dying. In the farthest vista field-guns were evidently getting in battery, ready to sweep from the earth a little force of dismounted cavalrymen who had come to close quarters with infantry and who were fighting on foot with carbines. The minié balls now and then sang sharply in the air, and in the excitement she did not realize the danger. Suddenly a puff of smoke rose from the battery, the shell winging its way high above the infantry line and at last falling among the dismounted cavalrymen, who, perceiving the situation to be hopeless, wavered, sought to rally, and at last broke and ran to the horse-holders hidden in the thickets. Thither the shells pursued them, bursting all along the plain, and as Mildred Fisher gazed she saw three men on the field, powerless to reach the shelter. One was wounded,--an officer, evidently,--and the other two were seeking to support him to his horse hard by. At this moment a fragment of shell killed the animal before their eyes. "Ride out! Ride out!" cried Millie Fisher to a horse-holder that she observed close by in the woods. He was mounted himself, and he held the bridles of three horses. He looked half bewildered, pale, disabled. A shell burst prematurely, out of range and wide of aim, high in the air above their heads. "I can't," he said; "I'm hit!"