“Ah, she’s about to go now,” exclaimed Sherburne.
The bridge seemed to Harry to rear up before his eyes like a living thing, and then draw together a mass of burning timbers. The next moment the whole went with a mighty crash into the river, and the blazing fragments floated swiftly away on the flood. The deep and rapid Shenandoah flowed a barrier between the armies of Jackson and Fremont.
“A river can be very beautiful without a bridge, Harry, can’t it?” said a voice beside him.
It was St. Clair, a heavy bandage over his left shoulder, but a smoking rifle in his right hand, nevertheless.
“I couldn’t stand it any longer, Harry,” he said. “I had to get up and join the Invincibles, and you see I’m all right.”
Harry was compelled to laugh at the sodden figure, from which the rain ran in streams. But he admired St. Clair’s spirit.
“It was by a hair’s breadth, Arthur,” he said.
“But we won across, just the same, and now I’m going back to that wagon to finish my cure. I fancy that we’ll now have a rest of six or eight hours, if General Jackson doesn’t think so much time taken from war a mere frivolity.”
The Southern army drew off slowly, but as soon as it was out of sight the tenacious Northern troops undertook to follow. They attempted to build a bridge of boats, but the flood was so heavy that they were swept away. Then Fremont set men to work to rebuild the bridge, which they could do in twenty-four hours, but Jackson, meanwhile, was using every one of those precious hours.
CHAPTER XIV. THE DOUBLE BATTLE
The twenty-four hours were a rest, merely by comparison. There was no pursuit, at least, the enemy was not in sight, but the scouts brought word that the bridge over the Shenandoah would be completed in a day and night, and that Fremont would follow. Jackson’s army triumphantly passed the last defile of the Massanuttons and the army of Shields did not appear issuing from it. It was no longer possible for them to be struck in front and on the flank at the same time, and the army breathed a mighty sigh of relief. At night of the next day Harry was sitting by the camp of the Invincibles, having received a brief leave of absence from the staff, and he detailed the news to his eager friends.
“General Jackson is stripping again for battle,” he said to Colonel Leonidas Talbot and Lieutenant-Colonel Hector St. Hilaire. “He’s sent all the sick and wounded across a ferry to Staunton, and he’s dispatched his prisoners and captured stores by another road. So he has nothing left but men fit for battle.”
“Which includes me,” said St. Clair proudly, showing his left shoulder from which the bandage had been taken, “I’m as well as ever.”
“Men get well fast with Stonewall Jackson,” said Colonel Talbot. “I’ll confess to you lads that I thought it was all up with us there in the lower valley, when we were surrounded by the masses of the enemy, and I don’t see yet how we got here.”
“But we are here, Leonidas,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Hector St. Hilaire, “and that’s enough for us to know.”
“Right, Hector, old friend. It’s enough for us to know. Do you by chance happen to have left two of those delightful cigarettes?”
“Just two, Leonidas, one for you and one for me, and now is a chance to smoke ’em.”
The young lieutenants drew to one side while the two old friends smoked and compared notes. They did not smoke, but they compared notes also, as they rested on the turf. The rain had ceased and the grass was dry. They saw through the twilight the dark mass of the Massanuttons, the extreme southern end, and Happy Tom Langdon waved his hand toward the mountain, like one who salutes a friend.
“Good old mountain,” he said. “You’ve been a buffer between us and the enemy more than once, but it took a mind like Stonewall Jackson’s to keep moving you around so you would stand between the armies of the enemy and make the Yankees fight, only one army at a time.”