However, now the first numbing terror of the bullet was changed to a sort of revengeful delight.  Relinquishing any return fire for a moment, the company, with a great shout, that sounded all along its front, dashed up the hill, through the scrub-oak at the brow, and then they could see the enemy slowly retiring, a chain of them a mile or more wide.  While one of the rebel ranks fired the other knelt, or lay flat upon the ground loading, where there were no natural obstacles to take shelter behind.  A vengeful shout ran along the Union lines.

“Capture them—­don’t fire!” and with one impulse the groups lied forward so swiftly that the enemy, believing the rush only momentary, delayed too long, and in two minutes the Union line was pell-mell among them.

“Surrender!” Jack shouted to the squad just ahead of him—­“surrender, or we’ll blow your heads off!” and along the line for some distance to his left and right he could hear his own exultant demand echoed.  There was nothing to do for the rebels, who had neglected to keep their enemies at the proper distance, but throw up their hands.  Jack’s squad sent back twenty-three prisoners to Major Mike, who took them in proud triumph to General Tyler, riding with the head of the column, now that the tenacity of the rebel skirmishers made it seem probable that there would be serious work.  But though the firing kept up as the Union forces advanced, no obstacle more, serious than the thin lines of the skirmishers revealed itself.

At dusk the bugles, moving with the captains in the rear, sounded the rally, and then the scattered groups came together in company.  They were to bivouac on the spot to await their regiment when it arrived.  Meanwhile, to the bitter discontent of the Caribee companies, their post of honor was taken by new troops, and they knew that next day they would march in line.  They had so enjoyed the glory of the first volleys, the first deaths, and the first prisoners, that, not remembering military procedure, they resented the change as an aspersion upon their valor.

When the regiment came up, however, they forgot their mortification in the eager questioning and envious jocularities of the rest.  Companies K and H were so beset that they forgot to boil their coffee, and would have gone thirsty to their dewy beds, if the other companies’ cooks had not shared their rations with the gossiping heroes.  As darkness fell, the sky was reddened for miles with pillars of fire, and for a time the Caribees thought it was the enemy.  But Tom Twigg, who had been with the major at headquarters, explained to Jack that the army was divided into three bodies of about ten thousand men each, and that Tyler’s column, of which the Caribees were the advance, were the extreme northern body; that they were now at Vienna, far north of Manassas, where Schenck had been beset a month before in his never-enough-ridiculed reconnaissance by train; that in the morning they were to push on to Fairfax Court-House