Stephen smiled.  “Very well, General,” he replied, General Sherman leaned forward.

“And do you remember I said to you, ’Brice, when you get ready to come into this war, let me know.’  Why didn’t you do it?”

Stephen thought a minute.  Then he said gravely, but with just a suspicion of humor about his mouth:—­ “General, if I had done that, you wouldn’t be here in my tent to-day.”

Like lightning the General was on his feet, his hand on Stephen’s shoulder.

“By gad, sir,” he cried, delighted, “so I wouldn’t.”

CHAPTER VIII

A STRANGE MEETING

The story of the capture of Vicksburg is the old, old story of failure turned into success, by which man is made immortal.  It involves the history of a general who never retraced his steps, who cared neither for mugwump murmurs nor political cabals, who took both blame and praise with equanimity.  Through month after month of discouragement, and work gone for naught, and fever and death, his eyes never left his goal.  And by grace of the wisdom of that President who himself knew sorrow and suffering and defeat and unjust censure, General Grant won.

Boldness did it.  The canal abandoned, one red night fleet and transports swept around the bend and passed the city’s heights, on a red river.  The Parrotts and the Dahlgrens roared, and the high bluffs flung out the sound over the empty swamp land.

Then there came the landing below, and the cutting loose from a base —­unheard of.  Corps behind cursed corps ahead for sweeping the country clear of forage.  Battles were fought.  Confederate generals in Mississippi were bewildered.

One night, while crossing with his regiment a pontoon bridge, Stephen Brice heard a shout raised on the farther shore.  Sitting together on a log under a torch, two men in slouch hats were silhouetted.  That one talking with rapid gestures was General Sherman.  The impassive profile of the other, the close-cropped beard and the firmly held cigar that seemed to go with it,—­Stephen recognized as that of the strange Captain Grant who had stood beside him in the street by the Arsenal He had not changed a whit.  Motionless, he watched corps after corps splash by, artillery, cavalry, and infantry, nor gave any sign that he heard their plaudits.

At length the army came up behind the city to a place primeval, where the face of the earth was sore and tortured, worn into deep gorges by the rains, and flung up in great mounds.  Stripped of the green magnolias and the cane, the banks of clay stood forth in hideous yellow nakedness, save for a lonely stunted growth, or a bare trunk that still stood tottering on the edge of a banks its pitiful withered roots reaching out below.  The May weather was already sickly hot.

First of all there was a murderous assault, and a still more murderous repulse.  Three times the besiegers charged, sank their color staffs into the redoubts, and three times were driven back.  Then the blue army settled into the earth and folded into the ravines.  Three days in that narrow space between the lines lay the dead and wounded suffering untold agonies in the moist heat.  Then came a truce to bury the dead, to bring back what was left of the living.