At this moment a young officer of artillery came riding slowly up the road attended by his bugler.  It was Captain Coulter.  He could not have been more than twenty-three years of age.  He was of medium height, but very slender and lithe, and sat his horse with something of the air of a civilian.  In face he was of a type singularly unlike the men about him; thin, high-nosed, gray-eyed, with a slight blond mustache, and long, rather straggling hair of the same color.  There was an apparent negligence in his attire.  His cap was worn with the visor a trifle askew; his coat was buttoned only at the sword-belt, showing a considerable expanse of white shirt, tolerably clean for that stage of the campaign.  But the negligence was all in his dress and bearing; in his face was a look of intense interest in his surroundings.  His gray eyes, which seemed occasionally to strike right and left across the landscape, like search-lights, were for the most part fixed upon the sky beyond the Notch; until he should arrive at the summit of the road there was nothing else in that direction to see.  As he came opposite his division and brigade commanders at the road-side he saluted mechanically and was about to pass on.  The colonel signed to him to halt.

“Captain Coulter,” he said, “the enemy has twelve pieces over there on the next ridge.  If I rightly understand the general, he directs that you bring up a gun and engage them.”

There was a blank silence; the general looked stolidly at a distant regiment swarming slowly up the hill through rough undergrowth, like a torn and draggled cloud of blue smoke; the captain appeared not to have observed him.  Presently the captain spoke, slowly and with apparent effort: 

“On the next ridge, did you say, sir?  Are the guns near the house?”

“Ah, you have been over this road before.  Directly at the house.”

“And it is—­necessary—­to engage them?  The order is imperative?”

His voice was husky and broken.  He was visibly paler.  The colonel was astonished and mortified.  He stole a glance at the commander.  In that set, immobile face was no sign; it was as hard as bronze.  A moment later the general rode away, followed by his staff and escort.  The colonel, humiliated and indignant, was about to order Captain Coulter in arrest, when the latter spoke a few words in a low tone to his bugler, saluted, and rode straight forward into the Notch, where, presently, at the summit of the road, his field-glass at his eyes, he showed against the sky, he and his horse, sharply defined and statuesque.  The bugler had dashed down the speed and disappeared behind a wood.  Presently his bugle was heard singing in the cedars, and in an incredibly short time a single gun with its caisson, each drawn by six horses and manned by its full complement of gunners, came bounding and banging up the grade in a storm of dust, unlimbered under cover, and was run forward by hand to the fatal crest among the dead horses.  A gesture of the captain’s arm, some strangely agile movements of the men in loading, and almost before the troops along the way had ceased to hear the rattle of the wheels, a great white cloud sprang forward down the slope, and with a deafening report the affair at Coulter’s Notch had begun.