Each driven by the same impulse stepped forward, and their hands met in the strong grasp of blood kindred and friendship, which war itself could not sever.

“You’re alive, Harry!” said Dick.  “It seems almost impossible after what has happened to-day.”

“And you too are all right.  Not harmed, I see, though your face is an African black.”

“I should call your own color dark and smoky.”

“I wasn’t sure that you were in the East.  When did you come?”

“With General Grant, and I knew that you were on General Lee’s staff.  I’ve a message to give him by you.  Oh! you needn’t laugh.  It’s a good straight talk.”

“Go ahead then and say it to me.”

“You say to General Lee that it’s all over.  Tell him to quit and send his soldiers home.  If he doesn’t he’ll be crushed.”

Harry laughed again and waved his finger at the somber battlefield, upon which he stood.

“Does this look like it?” he asked.  “We’re farther forward to-night than we were this morning.  Wouldn’t General Grant be glad if he could say as much?”

“It makes no difference.  I know you don’t believe me, but it’s so.  The North is prepared as it never was before.  And Grant will hammer and hammer forever.  We know what a man Lee is.  The whole North admits it, but I tell you the sun of the South is setting.”

“You’re growing poetical and poetry is no argument.”

“But unlimited men, unlimited cannon and rifles, unlimited ammunition and supplies and a general who is willing to use them, are.  Of course I know that you can’t carry any such message to General Lee, but I feel it to be the truth.”

“We’ve a great general and a great army that say, no.”

Nobody paid any attention to the two.  It was merely another one of those occasions when men of the opposing sides stood together amid the dead and wounded, and talked in friendly fashion.  But Harry knew that he could not delay long.

“I’ve got to go, Dick,” he said.  “And I’ve a message too, one that I want you to deliver to General Grant.”

“What is it?”

“Tell him that we’ve more than held our own to-day, and that we’ll thrash him like thunder to-morrow, and whenever and wherever he may choose, no matter what the odds are against us.”

Dick laughed.

“I see that you won’t believe even a little bit of what I tell you,” he said “and maybe if I were in your place I wouldn’t either.  But it’s true all the same.  Good-by, Harry.”

The two hands, covered with battle grime, met again in the strong grasp of blood kindred and friendship.

“Take care of yourself, old man!”

The words, exactly alike, were uttered by the two simultaneously.

Both were stirred deeply.  Harry sprang on his horse, looked back once, waving his hand, and rode rapidly to General Lee.  Later in the night, he received permission to hunt up the Invincibles, his heart full of fear that they had perished utterly in the gloomy pit called the Wilderness, lit now only by the fire of death.