flashes and hear a hundred reports, then I saw the man fall down out of the saddle.  My first feeling was of surprised gratification; my first impulse was an apprentice-sportsman’s impulse to run and pick up his game.  Somebody said, hardly audibly, ’Good—­we’ve got him!—­wait for the rest.’  But the rest did not come.  There was not a sound, not the whisper of a leaf; just perfect stillness; an uncanny kind of stillness, which was all the more uncanny on account of the damp, earthy, late-night smells now rising and pervading it.  Then, wondering, we crept stealthily out, and approached the man.  When we got to him the moon revealed him distinctly.  He was lying on his back, with his arms abroad; his mouth was open and his chest heaving with long gasps, and his white shirt-front was all splashed with blood.  The thought shot through me that I was a murderer; that I had killed a man—­a man who had never done me any harm.  That was the coldest sensation that ever went through my marrow.  I was down by him in a moment, helplessly stroking his forehead; and I would have given anything then—­my own life freely—­to make him again what he had been five minutes before.  And all the boys seemed to be feeling in the same way; they hung over him, full of pitying interest, and tried all they could to help him, and said all sorts of regretful things.  They had forgotten all about the enemy; they thought only of this one forlorn unit of the foe.  Once my imagination persuaded me that the dying man gave me a reproachful look out of his shadowy eyes, and it seemed to me that I would rather he had stabbed me than done that.  He muttered and mumbled like a dreamer in his sleep, about his wife and child; and I thought with a new despair, ’This thing that I have done does not end with him; it falls upon them too, and they never did me any harm, any more than he.’

In a little while the man was dead.  He was killed in war; killed in fair and legitimate war; killed in battle, as you might say; and yet he was as sincerely mourned by the opposing force as if he had been their brother.  The boys stood there a half hour sorrowing over him, and recalling the details of the tragedy, and wondering who he might be, and if he were a spy, and saying that if it were to do over again they would not hurt him unless he attacked them first.  It soon came out that mine was not the only shot fired; there were five others—­a division of the guilt which was a grateful relief to me, since it in some degree lightened and diminished the burden I was carrying.  There were six shots fired at once; but I was not in my right mind at the time, and my heated imagination had magnified my one shot into a volley.