But he was not afraid.  Danger had become so common that one looked upon it merely as a risk.  Moreover, he was never cooler or more ample of resource.  He dismounted softly, standing beside his horse’s head, holding the reins with one hand and a heavy pistol with the other.  He suspected that Shepard would do the same, but he believed that his eyes and ears were the keener.  The man must have been inside the Confederate lines all the afternoon.  Probably he had seen Harry riding away, and, deftly appropriating a horse, had followed him.  There was no end to Shepard’s ingenuity and daring.

Harry’s horse was trained to stand still indefinitely, and the young man, with the heavy pistol, who held the reins was also immovable.  The silence about him was so deep that Harry could hear the frogs croaking at a distant pool.

He waited a full five minutes, and now, like the wild animals, he relied more upon ear than eye.  He had learned the faculty of concentration and he bent all his powers upon his hearing.  Not the slightest sound could escape the tightly drawn drums of his ears.

He was motionless a full ten minutes.  Nor did the horse beside him stir.  It was a test of human endurance, the capacity to keep himself absolutely silent, but with every nerve attuned, while he waited for an invisible danger.  And those minutes were precious, too.  The value of not a single one of them could have been measured or weighed.  It was his duty to reach Longstreet at speed, because the general and his veterans must be in line in the morning, when the battle was joined.  Yet the incessant duel between Shepard and himself was at its height again, and he did not yet see how he could end it.

Harry felt that it must be essentially a struggle of patience, but when he waited a few minutes longer, the idea to wait with ears close to the earth, one of the oldest devices of primitive man, occurred to him.  It was fairly dry in the bushes, and he lay down, pressing his ear to the soil.  Then he heard a faint sound, as if some one crawling through the grass, like a wild animal stalking its prey.  It was Shepard, of course, and then Harry planned his campaign.  Shepard had left his horse, and was endeavoring to reach him by stealth.

Leaving his own horse, he crept a little to the right, and then rising carefully in another thicket he picked out every dark spot in the gloom.  He made out presently the figure of a riderless horse, standing partly behind the trunk of an oak, larger than most of those that grew in the Wilderness.

Harry knew that it was Shepard’s mount and that Shepard himself was some distance in front of it creeping toward the thicket which he supposed sheltered his foe.  There was barely enough light for Harry to see the horse’s head and regretfully he raised his heavy pistol.  But it had to be done, and when his aim was true he pulled the trigger.