Meade rose from study of the map an engineer officer was explaining.  He was unknown to Penhallow, who observed him with interest—­a tall spare man with grey-sprinkled dark hair a large Roman nose and spectacles over wide blue eyes; a gentleman of the best, modest, unassuming, and now carelessly clad.

“Colonel Penhallow,” said Hancock.

“Glad to see you.”  He turned to receive with evident pleasure a report of the morning’s fight on the right wing, glanced without obvious interest at the captured flag of the Stonewall Brigade, and greeted the colonel warmly.  “I can only offer you water,” he said.  “Sit down.  You may like to look over this map.”

While the Commander wrote orders and despatched aide after aide, Penhallow bent over the map.  “You see,” said Hancock, “we have unusual luck for us in a short interior line.  I judge from the moving guidons that Lee is extending his front—­it may be six miles long.”

“And ours?”

“Well, from wing to wing across the loop to right, not half of that.”

“I see,” said Penhallow, and accepting a drink of tepid water he went out to find and report to the chief of artillery, General Hunt.

He met him with General John Gibbon and two aides a few yards from the door, and making his brief report learned as he moved away that there was some trouble on the left wing.  Meade coming out with Hancock, they mounted and rode away in haste, too late to correct General Sickles’ unfortunate decision to improve General Meade’s battle-line.  It was not Penhallow’s business, nor did he then fully understand that costly blunder.  Returning to his guns, he sent, as Hunt had ordered, two of his reserve batteries up to the back of the line of the Second Corps, and finding General Gibbon temporarily in command walked with him to what is now called the “Crest” and stood among Cushing’s guns.  Alertly interested, Penhallow saw to the left, half hidden by bushes and a clump of trees, a long line of infantry lying at ease, their muskets in glittering stacks behind them.  To the right the ground was more open.  A broken stone fence lay in front of the Second Corps.  It was patched with fence rails and added stone, and where the clump of trees projected in advance of the line made a right angle and extended thence in front of the batteries on the Crest about thirty yards.  Then it met a like right angle of stone fencing and followed the line far to the right.  Behind these rude walls lay the Pennsylvania and New York men, three small regiments.  Further back on a little higher ground was the silent array of cannon, thus able at need to fire over the heads of the guarding infantry, now idly lying at rest in the baking heat of a July morning.  The men about the cannon lounged at ease on the ground in the forty foot interspaces between the batteries, some eighteen pieces in all.

Suddenly an aide rode up, and saying, “See you again, Penhallow,” Gibbon rode away in haste.  Penhallow, who was carefully gathering in all that could then be seen from the locality, moved over to where a young battery captain was leaning against a cannon wheel wiping the sweat from his face or gazing over the vale below him, apparently lost in thought.  “Captain Cushing, I believe,” said the colonel.  “I am Colonel Penhallow, in command of the reserve artillery.”