When the men confronted one another it was seen that they were a fairly-good match. The English man was stouter and heavier; he showed a splendid forearm, with corresponding swelling muscles near the shoulders, and the way he poised himself and put up his hands revealed that he had "science" as well as strength and courage. Shorty was taller and more spare, but he was quicker and had the longer reach. It looked as if the Englishman had the advantage, from his solid strength and staying power, as well as "science." But those who looked on Shorty as inferior did not know of the training he had received among the turbulent crews of the Mississippi River boats. A man who had summered and wintered with that fractious race had little to learn in any trick or device of fighting.The beam cut her down where she stood and left a swathe of jungle behind her black and smoking.
FORE:It was finally arranged that Si should move his squad out to near the edge of the path and wait for Lieut. Bigelow to come up, while Shorty should go forward and reconnoiter.
ONE:The tall, very stiff young Aid, with whom Si and Shorty had had the previous affair, came stalking on to the ground, viewing everything with his usual cold, superior, critical gaze.
TWO:"O, come off, Monty," called the more prosaic Gid Mackall; "you know we didn't have no artillery. If we'd had, we'd a blowed 'em clean offen the hill."The llth of May, 1864, saw all the clouds of battle which had been whirling for days in such apparently diverse directions, gathering about the deep gorge in Rocky Face Ridge through which the railroad passed. "Buzzard Roost," as this was named, was the impregnable citadel behind which the rebel army had taken refuge after its rout at Mission Ridge the previous November, and the rebel engineers had since exhausted every effort to make it still more unassailable. The lofty mountain rose precipitously for hundreds of feet on either side the narrow gorge, and the last hundred feet was a sheer wall of perpendicular rock. The creek which ran through the gorge had been dammed, so that its waters formed a broad, deep moat before the mouth of the gorge. The top of the ridge swarmed with men, and to the rear of the gorge guns were massed in emplacements to sweep every foot of the passage.
THREE:Cadnan understood. "All right," he said, and the three masters left the room without more words. The door shut behind them and Gornom visibly relaxed. Yet there was still wariness behind the old eye. "I work in the field," he said after a second. "I am good worker in the field."
FORE:
"A real gun, that'll be all my own, and will shoot and kick, and crack loud?"He was happy. Slowly he realized that he had hardly ever been happy before.THE Deacon was repaid seventyfold by Si's and Shorty's enjoyment of the stew he had prepared for them, and the extraordinary good it had seemed to do them as they lay wounded in the hospital at Chattanooga, to which place the Deacon had gone as soon as he learned that Si was hurt in the battle.Si and Harry broke down a thick layer of cedar branches to make a comfortable bed for Gid, placed a chunk under his head, and hurried away again to search for Alf Russell. They went over carefully that part of the works they had crossed, and the abatis in front, but could find no trace of him. They feared that after he had been shot he had crawled back under the shelter of some tree-tops, to protect him from the flying bullets, and died there. They turned over and pulled apart the branches for a wide space, but did not succeed in finding him, or any trace. But they found Bob Willis, stark in death, lying prone in the top of a young hickory, into which he had crashed, when the fatal bullet found him pressing courageously forward. Him they carried pitifully forward, and added to the lengthening row of the regiment's dead, which was being gathered up.
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$378
$428
