For nearly a quarter of an
hour the wood was full of sabre-strokes, carbine-shots, and yells,
which mingled with the roll of the storm. Then the fight ended.
My friend of the cocked pistol threw himself, sabre in hand, upon the
Federal front, and it shook, and gave back, and retreated. The weight
of the onset seemed to sweep it, inch by inch, away. The blue squadron
finally broke, and scattered in every direction. The grays pressed on
with loud cheers, firing as they did so:--five minutes afterward, the
storm-lashed wood had swallowed pursuers and pursued.
The whole had disappeared like phantom horsemen in the direction of the
Rappahannock.
IV.
MOHUN AND HIS PRISONER.
Half an hour afterward, the storm had spent its fury, and I was
standing by a bivouac fire on the banks of the Rappahannock, conversing
with the officer against whom I had driven my horse in the darkness.
Mounted upon a powerful gray, he had led the attack with a sort of
fury, and I now looked at him with some curiosity.
He was a man of about thirty, of gaunt face and figure, wearing a hat
with a black feather, and the uniform of a colonel of cavalry. The
features were regular and might have been called handsome; the eyes,
hair, mustache, and imperial--he wore no beard--coal black; the
complexion so pale that the effect was startling.
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