“Yes, we were outnumbered yesterday and—­well licked.  Why they did not rush us, the Lord knows!”

“Give me some idea of our position.”

“Well, sir, here to our right is Cemetery Hill, strongly held; to your left the line turns east and then south in a loop to wooded hills—­one Culp’s, they call it.  That is our right.  There is a row on there as you can hear.  Before us as we stand our position runs south along a low ridge and ends on two pretty high-wooded hills they call Round Tops.  That’s our left.  From our front the ground slopes down some forty feet or so, and about a mile away the Rebs hold the town seminary and a long low rise facing us.”

“Thank you, that seems pretty clear.  There is firing over beyond the cemetery?”

“Yes, the skirmishers get cross now and then.  The road seems clear, sir.”

Orders rang out and the guns rattled up the pike like some monstrous articulated insect, all encumbering wagons being swept aside to make way for the privileged guns.

“You are to park here, sir, on the open between this and the Taneytown road.  There is a brook—­a creek.”

“Thanks, that is clear.”

The ground thus chosen lay some hundred yards behind the low crest held midway of our line by the Second Corps, whence the ground fell away in a gentle slope.  The space back of our line was in what to a layman’s eye would have seemed the wildest confusion of wagons, ambulances, ammunition mules, cattle, and wandering men.  It was slowly assuming some order as the Provost Guard, dusty, despotic and cross, ranged the wagons, drove back stragglers, and left wide lanes for the artillery to move at need to the front.

The colonel spent some hours in getting his guns placed and in seeing that no least detail was lacking.  With orders about instant readiness, with a word of praise here, of sharp criticism there, he turned away a well-contented man and walked up the slope in search of the headquarters.  As he approached the front, he saw the bushy ridge in which, or back of which, the men lay at rest.  Behind them were surgeons selecting partially protected places for immediate aid, stretcher-bearers, ambulances and all the mechanism of help for the wounded.  Officers were making sure that men had at hand one hundred rounds of ammunition.

Some three hundred yards behind the mid-centre of the Second Corps, on the Taneytown road, Penhallow was directed to a small, rather shabby one-storey farm-house.  “By George,” he murmured, “here is one general who means to be near the front.”  He was met at the door by the tall handsome figure of General Hancock, a blue-eyed man with a slight moustache over a square expressively firm jaw.

“Glad to see you, Penhallow.  Meade was anxious—­I knew you would be on time.  Come in.”

Penhallow saw before him a mean little room, on one side a wide bed with a gaudy coverlet, on a pine table in the centre a bucket of water, a tin cup, and a candle-stick.  Five rickety rush-covered chairs completed the furnishings.