I had come to talk with Will, but our conversation was obliged to be
deferred. The brave boys of the horse artillery, officers and men,
gathered round to hear the news from Petersburg; and it was a rare
pleasure to me to see again the old familiar faces. Around me, in light
of the camp-fire, were grouped the tigers who had fought with Pelham,
in the old battles of Stuart. Here were the heroes of a hundred
combats; the men who had held their ground desperately in the most
desperate encounters--the bulldogs who had showed their teeth and
sprung to the death-grapple at Cold Harbor, Manassas, Sharpsburg,
Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Fleetwood, Gettysburg, in the
Wilderness, at Trevillian's, at Sappony, in a thousand bitter conflicts
with the cavalry. Scarred faces, limping bodies, the one-armed, the
one-legged,--these I saw around me; the frames slashed and mutilated,
but the eyes flashing and full of fight, as in the days when Pelham
thundered, loosing his war-hounds on the enemy. I had seen brave
commands, in these long years of combat--had touched the hands of
heroic men, whose souls fear never entered--but I never saw braver
fighters than the horse artillery--soldiers more reckless than Pelham's
bloodhounds. They went to battle laughing. There was something of the
tiger in them.
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