The standards dipped for a moment before a
sharp fire, and then, as the colour bearers shook out the bright folds,
soared like great red birds' wings above the smoke.
It seemed to Dan that he stood for hours motionless there against the
pines. For a time the fight passed away from him, and he remembered a
mountain storm which had caught him as a boy in the woods at Chericoke. He
heard again the cloud burst overhead, the soughing of the pines and the
crackling of dried branches as they came drifting down through interlacing
boughs. The old childish terror returned to him, and he recalled his mad
rush for light and space when he had doubled like a hare in the wooded
twilight among the dim bodies of the trees. Then as now it was not the open
that he feared, but the unseen horror of the shelter.
Again the affectionate voice came from the sunlight and he gripped his
musket as he started forward. He had caught only the last words, and he
repeated them half mechanically, as he stepped out from the brushwood. Once
again, when he stood on the trampled broom-sedge, he said them over with a
nervous jerk, "Wait until they come within fifty yards--and, for God's
sake, boys, shoot at the knees!"
He thought of the jolly Colonel, and laughed hysterically. Why, he had been
at that man's wedding--had kissed his bride--and now he was begging him to
shoot at people's knees!
With a cheer, the regiment broke from cover and swept forward toward the
summit of the hill.
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