sudden relief of his dark, watchful, composed face uplifted above a
line of bayonets, never failed in their magic. Like all born leaders,
he seemed in these emergencies to hold a charmed life--infecting his
followers with a like disbelief in death; men dropped to right and left
of him with serene assurance in their ghastly faces or a cry of life and
confidence in their last gasp. Stragglers fell in and closed up
under his passing glance; a hopeless, inextricable wrangle around an
overturned caisson, at a turn of the road, resolved itself into an
orderly, quiet, deliberate clearing away of the impediment before the
significant waiting of that dark, silent horseman.
Yet under this imperturbable mask he was keenly conscious of everything;
in that apparent concentration there was a sharpening of all his senses
and his impressibility: he saw the first trace of doubt or alarm in the
face of a subaltern to whom he was giving an order; the first touch of
sluggishness in a re-forming line; the more significant clumsiness of
a living evolution that he knew was clogged by the dead bodies of
comrades; the ominous silence of a breastwork; the awful inertia of some
rigidly kneeling files beyond, which still kept their form but never
would move again; the melting away of skirmish points; the sudden gaps
here and there; the sickening incurving of what a moment before had been
a straight line--all these he saw in all their fatal significance. But
even at this moment, coming upon a hasty barricade of overset commissary
wagons, he stopped to glance at a familiar figure he had seen but
an hour ago, who now seemed to be commanding a group of collected
stragglers and camp followers. Mounted on a wheel, with a revolver in
each hand and a bowie knife between his teeth--theatrical even in his
paroxysm of undoubted courage--glared Jim Hooker. And Clarence Brant,
with the whole responsibility of the field on his shoulders, even at
that desperate moment, found himself recalling a vivid picture of the
|