Harry and his young comrades were lost in the mists and doubts of uncertainty. Nothing could shake their confidence in Lee and Jackson, but yet they were only human beings. Had the time come when there was more to be done than any men, great and brilliant as they might be, could do? Yet they refused to express their apprehensions to one another, and waited, their hearts now and then beating heavily.
Thus the last day of April passed, and for Harry it was more fully surcharged with suspense and anxiety than any other that he had yet known. The forests and the fields were flush with the green of early spring. Little wild flowers were peeping up in the thickets, and now and then a bird, full throated, sang on a bough, indifferent to passing armies.
But Harry saw a red tint over everything. The spirit of his great ancestor had descended upon him again. The acute sense which warned him of mighty and tragic events soon to come was alive and active. His mind traveled backward too. Sometimes he did not see the men around him, but saw instead Pendleton, the boys playing in the fields, and his father. He also saw again that log house in the Kentucky mountains, and the old, old woman who had known his great-grandfather, Henry Ware. Once more he heard like a whisper in his ears her parting words: “You will come again, and you will be thin and pale and in rags, and you will fall at the door. I see you coming with these two eyes of mine.”
What did they mean? What did those strange words mean? It was the first time in a year, perhaps, that he had thought of that old, old woman, and the log house in the mountains. But he saw her now, and she was strangely vivid for one so old and so withered. Then she vanished, and for the time was forgotten completely, because Lee and Jackson were riding past, one on Traveler and the other on Little Sorrel, and it was no time to be dreaming of glens in the mountains and their peace, because mighty armies were closing in, bent upon the destruction of each other.
All that afternoon Harry heard in a half circle about him the distant moaning of cannon, and he caught glimpses of galloping horsemen. Stuart, equally at home on the floor of the ballroom or the field of battle, was leading his troopers in a daring circuit. When he saw that the Army of the Potomac was moving toward Chancellorsville he had cut in on its right flank, taking prisoners, and when a Union regiment had stood in his way, attempting to bar his path to his own army, he had ridden over it and gone.
All the time the sinister moaning of the guns on the far horizon never ceased. It was this distant threat that oppressed Harry more than anything else. It beat softly on the drums of his ears, and it said to him continually that his army must make a supreme effort or perish. General Jackson did not call upon him to do anything, and once he rode forward with Dalton and looked at Sedgwick’s Union masses upon the plains of Fredericksburg, still protected by the batteries which had not yet been moved from Stafford Heights. Harry thought, for a while, that Lee and Jackson would certainly attack there, but night came and they had made no movement for that purpose.
But before the sun had set Harry with his glasses had been able to command a wide view. He saw high up in the air three captive balloons, from which some of Hooker’s officers looked upon the Southern intrenchments. Hooker also had signalmen on every height, and an ample field telegraph. What Harry did not see he learned from the Southern scouts. It seemed impossible that Lee and Jackson could break through the circle of steel, and Hooker thought so, too.
When the red sun set on that last day of April the confidence of the Northern general was at its height. He had sent word to Sedgwick to keep a close watch upon the enemy in his front, and if he exposed a weak point to attack and destroy him. And if he showed signs of retreat, also to follow and attack with the utmost vigor.