The report alarmed the camp; drums beat the long roll and bugles sounded the assembly, bringing swarms of half-clad men into the moonlight, dressing as they ran, and falling into line at the sharp commands of their officers.  This was well; being in line the men were under control; they stood at arms while the general’s staff and the men of his escort brought order out of confusion by lifting off the fallen tent and pulling apart the breathless and bleeding actors in that strange contention.

Breathless, indeed, was one:  the captain was dead; the handle of the bowie-knife, protruding from his throat, was pressed back beneath his chin until the end had caught in the angle of the jaw and the hand that delivered the blow had been unable to remove the weapon.  In the dead man’s hand was his sword, clenched with a grip that defied the strength of the living.  Its blade was streaked with red to the hilt.

Lifted to his feet, the general sank back to the earth with a moan and fainted.  Besides his bruises he had two sword-thrusts—­one through the thigh, the other through the shoulder.

The spy had suffered the least damage.  Apart from a broken right arm, his wounds were such only as might have been incurred in an ordinary combat with nature’s weapons.  But he was dazed and seemed hardly to know what had occurred.  He shrank away from those attending him, cowered upon the ground and uttered unintelligible remonstrances.  His face, swollen by blows and stained with gouts of blood, nevertheless showed white beneath his disheveled hair—­as white as that of a corpse.

“The man is not insane,” said the surgeon, preparing bandages and replying to a question; “he is suffering from fright.  Who and what is he?”

Private Tassman began to explain.  It was the opportunity of his life; he omitted nothing that could in any way accentuate the importance of his own relation to the night’s events.  When he had finished his story and was ready to begin it again nobody gave him any attention.

The general had now recovered consciousness.  He raised himself upon his elbow, looked about him, and, seeing the spy crouching by a camp-fire, guarded, said simply: 

“Take that man to the parade ground and shoot him.”

“The general’s mind wanders,” said an officer standing near.

“His mind does not wander,” the adjutant-general said.  “I have a memorandum from him about this business; he had given that same order to Hasterlick”—­with a motion of the hand toward the dead provost-marshal—­ “and, by God! it shall be executed.”

Ten minutes later Sergeant Parker Adderson, of the Federal army, philosopher and wit, kneeling in the moonlight and begging incoherently for his life, was shot to death by twenty men.  As the volley rang out upon the keen air of the midnight, General Clavering, lying white and still in the red glow of the camp-fire, opened his big blue eyes, looked pleasantly upon those about him and said:  “How silent it all is!”