Minutes passed.  Fitz Hugh tried to think of his injury, and to steel himself against his chief.  But the roar of battle on the right, and the suspense and imminence of battle on the left, absorbed the attention of even this wounded and angry spirit, as, indeed, they might have absorbed that of any being not more or less than human.  A private wrong, insupportable though it might be, seemed so small amid that deadly clamor and awful expectation!  Moreover, the intellect which worked so calmly and vigorously by his side, and which alone of all things near appeared able to rule the coming crisis, began to dominate him, in spite of his sense of injury.  A thought crossed him to the effect that the great among men are too valuable to be punished for their evil deeds.  He turned to the absorbed brigade commander, now not only his ruler, but even his protector, with a feeling that he must accord him a word of peace, a proffer in some form of possible forgiveness and friendship.  But the man’s face was clouded and stern with responsibility and authority.  He seemed at that moment too lofty to be approached with a message of pardon.  Fitz Hugh gazed at him with a mixture of profound respect and smothered hate.  He gazed, turned away, and remained silent.

Minutes more passed.  Then a mounted orderly dashed up at full speed, with the words, “Colonel, Major Gahogan has fronted.”

“Has he?” answered Waldron, with a smile which thanked the trooper and made him happy.  “Ride on through the thicket here, my man, and tell Colonel Gildersleeve to push up his skirmishers.”

With a thud of hoofs and a rustling of parting foliage the cavalryman disappeared amid the underwood.  A minute or two later a thin, dropping rattle of musketry, five hundred yards or so to the front, announced that the sharpshooters of the Fourteenth were at work.  Almost immediately there was an angry response, full of the threatenings and execution of death.  Through the lofty leafage tore the screech of a shell, bursting with a sharp crash as it passed overhead, and scattering in humming slivers.  Then came another, and another, and many more, chasing each other with hoarse hissings through the trembling air, a succession of flying serpents.  The enemy doubtless believed that nearly the whole attacking force was massed in the wood around the road, and they had brought at least four guns to bear upon that point, and were working them with the utmost possible rapidity.  Presently a large chestnut, not fifty yards from Fitz Hugh was struck by a shot.  The solid trunk, nearly three feet in diameter, parted asunder as if it were the brittlest of vegetable matter.  The upper portion started aside with a monstrous groan, dropped in a standing posture to the earth, and then toppled slowly, sublimely prostrate, its branches crashing and all its leaves wailing.  Ere long, a little further to the front, another Anak of the forest went down; and, mingled with the noise of its sylvan agony, there arose sharp cries of human suffering.  Then Colonel Colburn, a broad-chested and ruddy man of thirty-five, with a look of indignant anxiety in his iron-gray eyes, rode up to the brigade commander.