had been faithfully kept by the men. This made a difference in her position
for which even the bullets in her wheels did not wholly atone; even Harris,
the sergeant of her detachment, felt that.

It was only a few days later, however, that abundant atonement was made.
The new general did not retire across the Rapidan after his first defeat,
and a new battle had to be fought: a battle, if anything, more furious,
more terrible than the first, when the dead filled the trenches
and covered the fields. He simply marched by the left flank,
and Lee marching by the right flank to head him, flung himself upon him again
at Spottsylvania Court-House. That day the Cat, standing in her place
behind the new and temporary breastwork thrown up when the battery was posted,
had the felloes of her wheels, which showed above the top of the bank,
entirely cut away by Minie-bullets, so that when she jumped in the recoil
her wheels smashed and let her down. This covered all old scores.
The other guns had been cut down by shells or solid shot;
but never before had one been gnawed down by musket-balls.
From this time all through the campaign the Cat held her own beside
her brazen and bloody sisters, and in the cold trenches before Petersburg
that winter, when the new general -- Starvation -- had joined the one
already there, she made her bloody mark as often as any gun on the long lines.

Thus the old battery had come to be known, as its old commander, now colonel
of a battalion, had come to be known by those in yet higher command.
And when in the opening spring of 1865 it became apparent to the leaders
of both armies that the long line could not longer be held if a force
should enter behind it, and, sweeping the one partially unswept portion
of Virginia, cut the railways in the southwest, and a man was wanted
to command the artillery in the expedition sent to meet this force,
it was not remarkable that the old Colonel and his battalion should be