“Steve again saw from afar the approach of the nightmare. It stood large on the opposite bank of Abraham’s Creek, and he must go to meet it. He was wedged between comrades--Sergeant Coffin was looking straight at him with his melancholy, bad-tempered eyes--he could not fall out, drop behind! The backs of his hands began to grow cold and his unwashed forehead was damp beneath matted, red-brown elf locks. From considerable experience he knew that presently sick stomach would set in.... Seized with panic he bit a cartridge and loaded. The air was rocking; moreover, with the heavier waves came a sharp _zzzz-ip_! _zzzzzz-ip_! Heaven and earth blurred together, blended by the giant brush of eddying smoke. Steve tasted powder, smelled powder. On the other side of the fence, from a battery lower down the slope to the guns beyond him two men were running--running very swiftly, with bent heads. They ran like people in a pelting rain and between them they carried a large bag or bundle, slung in an oilcloth. They were tall and hardy men, and they moved with a curious air of determination. ‘Carrying powder! Gawd! before I’d be sech a fool----’ A shell came, and burst--burst between the two men. There was an explosion, ear-splitting, heart-rending. A part of the fence was wrecked; a small cedar tree torn into kindling. Steve put down his musket, laid his forehead upon the rail before him, and vomited.” We meet Stonewall Jackson for the first time in the novel’s pages: “First Brigade headquarters was a tree--an especially big tree-a little removed from the others. Beneath it stood a kitchen chair and a wooden table, requisitioned from the nearest cabin and scrupulously paid for. At one side was an extremely small tent, but Brigadier-General T. J. Jackson rarely occupied it. He sat beneath the tree, upon the kitchen chair, his feet, in enormous cavalry boots, planted precisely before him, his hands rigid at his sides. Here he transacted the business of each day, and here, when it was over, he sat facing the North. An awkward, inarticulate, and peculiar man, with strange notions about his health and other matters, there was about him no breath of grace, romance, or pomp of war. He was ungenial, ungainly, with large hands and feet, with poor eyesight and a stiff address. There did not lack spruce and handsome youths in his command who were vexed to the soul by the idea of being led to battle by such a figure. The facts that he had fought very bravely in Mexico, and that he had for the enemy a cold and formidable hatred were for him; most other things against him. He drilled his troops seven hours a day. His discipline was of the sternest, his censure a thing to make the boldest officer blanch. A blunder, a slight negligence, any disobedience of orders--down came reprimand, suspension, arrest, with an iron certitude, a relentlessness quite like Nature’s. Apparently he was without imagination. He had but little sense of humor, and no understanding of a joke.