“Where did you get this, Josiah?” he asked.

“Kind of came in, sir—­know’d he was wanted—­laid two eggs.”  The colonel laughed and asked no further questions.

“Pull off my boots.  Horses all right?”

“Yes, sir.”

Without-undressing he fell on his camp-bed and, towards dusk thinking with grim humour of his wife and the Penhallow guns, fell asleep.  About four in the morning the mad clamour of battle awakened him.  He got up and went out of the tent.  The night air was hot and oppressive.  Far to our right there was the rattle of musketry and the occasional upward flare of cannon flashes against low-lying clouds.  From the farthest side of the Taneytown road at the rear he heard the rattle of ambulances arriving from the field of fight to leave the wounded in tent hospitals.  They came slowly, marked by their flickering lanterns, and were away again more swiftly.  He gave some vague thought to the wounded and to the surgeons, for whom the night was as the day.  At sunrise he went up past the already busy headquarters and came to the bush-hidden lines, where six thousand men of the Second Corps along a half mile of the irregular far-stretched Crest were up and busy.  Fires were lighted, coffee boiled and biscuits munched.  An air of confidence and gaiety among the men pleased him as he paused to give a sergeant a pipe light and divided his tobacco among a thankful group of ragged soldiers.  All was quiet.  An outpost skirmish on the right, as a man said, “was petering out.”  He paused here and there to talk to the men, and was interested to hear them discussing with intelligence the advantage of our short line.  Now and then the guns far to left or right quarrelled, but at eleven in the morning this third of July all was quiet except the murmurous noise of thousands of men who talked or lay at rest in the bushes or contrived a refuge from the sun under shelter of a canvas hung on ramrods.

Generals Gibbon and Webb, coming near, promised him a late breakfast, and he went with them to the little peach orchard near the headquarters on the Taneytown road.  They sat down on mess-chests or cracker-boxes, and to Penhallow’s amusement Josiah appeared with John, the servant of Gibbon, for Josiah was, as he said, on easy terms with every black servant in the line.  Presently Hancock rode up with Meade.  Generals Newton and Pleasanton also appeared, and with their aides joined them.  These men were officially Penhallow’s superiors, and although Hancock and Gibbon were his friends, he made no effort to take part in the discussion in regard to what the passing day would bring.  He had his own opinion, but no one asked for it and he smoked in an undisturbed private council of war.

At last, as he rose, Newton said, “You knew John Reynolds well, Penhallow.  A moment before he fell, his aide had begged him to fall back to a less dangerous position.”

“He was my friend—­a soldier of the best.”