the main column who were tempted to enter it from the hedges and bushes
where they had been creeping and hiding. Suddenly a prolonged yell from
the hidden slope beyond--the nearest sound that had yet been heard from
that ominous distance--sent them to cover again. It was followed by
the furious galloping of horses in the lane, and a handsome, red-capped
officer, accompanied by an orderly, dashed down the track, wheeled,
leaped the hedge, rode out on the slope and halted. In another instant a
cloud of dust came whirling down the lane after him. Out of it strained
the heavy shoulders and tightened chain-traces of six frantic horses
dragging the swaying gun that in this tempest of motion alone seemed
passive and helpless with an awful foreknowledge of its power. As in
obedience to a signal from the officer they crashed through the hedge
after him, a sudden jolt threw an artilleryman from the limber before
the wheel. A driver glanced back on the tense chain and hesitated. "Go
on!" yelled the prostrate man, and the wheel went over him. Another and
another gun followed out of the dust cloud, until the whole battery had
deployed on the slope. Before the drifting dust had fairly settled, the
falling back of the panting horses with their drivers gave a momentary
glimpse of the nearest gun already in position and of the four erect
figures beside it. The yell that seemed to have evoked this sudden
apparition again sounded nearer; a blinding flash broke from the
gun, which was instantly hidden by the closing group around it, and
a deafening crash with the high ringing of metal ran down the lane. A
column of white, woolly smoke arose as another flash broke beside it.
This was quickly followed by another and another, with a response from
the gun first fired, until the whole slope shook and thundered. And the
smoke, no longer white and woolly, but darkening and thickening as with
unburnt grains of gunpowder, mingled into the one ominous vapor, and
driving along the lane hid even the slope from view.