Homepage
Login
Profile
BookClubs
dmBox
Read this ebook for free! No credit card needed, absolutely nothing to pay.
Words: 88843 in 36 pages
This is an ebook sharing website. You can read the uploaded ebooks for free here. No credit cards needed, nothing to pay. If you want to own a digital copy of the ebook, or want to read offline with your favorite ebook-reader, then you can choose to buy and download the ebook.
PAGE
"Who are you?" 89
"I may stroke his fur as much as I please" 166
Taking the papers from Campbell's hand, passed out of the house without a word of farewell 208
EVELYN BYRD
A STRICKEN CORSAGE
A BATTERY of six twelve-pounder Napoleon guns lay in a little skirt of woodland on the south bank of the Rapidan. It was raining, not violently, but with a soaking persistence that might well have made the artillery-men tired of life and ready to welcome whatever end that day's skirmishing might bring to the weariness of living. But these men were veteran soldiers, inured to hardship as well as to danger. A saturating rain meant next to nothing to them. A day's discomfort, more or less, counted not at all in the monotonously uncomfortable routine of their lives.
They had been sent into the woodland an hour or two ago, and had done a little desultory firing now and then, merely by way of disturbing the movements of small bodies of the enemy who were being shifted about on the other side of the river.
Just now the guns were silent, no enemy being in sight, and Captain Marshall Pollard being disposed to save his ammunition against the time, now obviously near at hand, when the new commander of the Federal forces, General Grant, should push the Army of the Potomac across the river to make a final trial of strength and sagacity with that small but wonderfully fighting Army of Northern Virginia directed by the master mind of Robert E. Lee.
But, while no enemy was within sight, there was a hornets' nest of Federal sharp-shooters concealed in a barn not far beyond the river, and from their secure cover they were very seriously annoying the Confederate lines. The barn lay a little to the left of the battery front, but near enough for the sharp-shooters' bullets to cut twigs from the tree under which Captain Marshall Pollard sat on horseback with Owen Kilgariff by his side. Still, the fire of the sharp-shooters was not mainly directed upon the woodland-screened battery, but upon the troops in the open field on Pollard's left.
Presently Captain Pollard, with the peculiar deliberation which characterised all his actions, lowered his field-glass from his eyes, and, withdrawing a handkerchief from a rain-proof breast pocket, began polishing the mist-obscured lenses. As he did so, he said to Kilgariff:--
"Order one of the guns to burn that barn."
Free books android app tbrJar TBR JAR Read Free books online gutenberg
(0)More posts by @FreeBooks
