vance division dangerous and quickly withdrew with the loss of two thousand men.

Once more he determined to turn Lee's flank and hurled his army toward Cold Harbor. This time he reached his chosen ground before his opponent and on the 31st, Sheridan's cavalry took possession of the place. The two armies had rushed for this point in waving parallel lines, flashing at each other deathdealing volleys as they touched.

Both armies immediately began to entrench in their chosen positions. Lee, familiar with his ground, had chosen his position with consummate skill. On June the 1st, the preliminary attack was made at six o'clock in the afternoon. It was short and bloody. The Northern division under Smith and Wright charged and lost two thousand two hundred men in an hour.

Again Lee had placed his guns and infantry in a fiery crescent on the hills arranged to catch both flanks and front of an advancing army.

Grant's soldiers knew that grim work had been cut out for them on that fatal morning the third day of June. As John Vaughan walked along the lines the night before he saw thousands of silent men busy with their needle and thread sewing their names on their underclothing.

The hot, close weather of the preceding days had ended in a grateful rain at five o'clock, which continued through the night and brought the tired, suffering men gracious relief.

Grant decided to assault the whole Confederate front and gave his orders for the attack at the first streak of dawn at four-thirty.

The charging blue hosts literally walked into the crater of a volcano flaming in their faces and pouring tons of steel and lead into their stricken flanks. Nothing like it had ever before been seen in the history of

war.

Ten thousand men in blue fell in twenty minutes! The battle was practically over at half past seven o'clock.

General Smith received an order from Meade to renew the assault and flatly refused.

The scene which followed has no parallel in the records of human suffering. Its horror is inconceivable and unthinkable. Through the summer nights the shrieks and groans of the wounded and dying rose in pitiful endless waves. And no hand was lifted to save. For three days they lay begging for water, groaning and dying where they had fallen. It was certain death to venture in that storm-swept space. Only a few brave men fought their way through to rescue a fallen comrade.

It was not until the 7th that a truce was arranged to clear this shamble and then every man in blue was dead save two. Everywhere blood, blood, blood in dark slippery pools-dead horses-dead men-smashed guns, legs, arms, torn and mangled pieces of bodiesthe earth plowed with shot and shell.

Thirty days had passed since Grant met Lee in the tangled Wilderness and the Northern army had lost sixty thousand men, two thousand a day.

It is small wonder that he decided not to try longer "to fight it out on that line."

Lee had put out of combat as many men for his opponent as he had under his command at any time

and his army with the reinforcements he had received! was now as strong as the day he met Grant.

For twelve days the two armies lay in their entrenchments on this field of death while the Federal Commander arranged a new plan of campaign. The sharpshooting was incessant. No man in all the line of blue could stand erect and live an instant. Soldiers whose time of service had expired and were ordered home, had to crawl on their hands and knees through the trenches to the rear.

The new Commander, on whose genius the President and the people had planted their brightest hopes, had just reached the spot where McClellan stood in June, 1862. And he might have gotten there by the James under cover of his gunboats without the loss of a single life.

Again John Vaughan's memory turned to McClellan with desperate bitterness. The longer he brooded over the hideous scenes of the past month, the higher rose his blind rage against the President.

CHAPTER XXXIII

THE BROTHERS MEET

When Julius, who had returned to John Vaughan's service, saw those piles of dead men on the field of Cold Harbor he lost faith in the Union Cause. He made up his mind that the past month's work had more than paid for that letter to the President and he took to the woods on his own hook.

He rose

He lay down to sleep the night he deserted in a clump of trees near the Confederate outposts and rested his head on a pillow of pine straw. When he waked in the morning at dawn he felt something tickle his nose. He cautiously reached one hand up to see what it was and felt a lock of hair. slowly, fearing to look till he had gained his feet. He turned his eyes at last and saw that he had been sleeping on a dead man's head protruding through the shallow dirt and pine straw that had been hastily thrown over it the first day of the battle.

With a yell of terror he started on a run for his life.

He never stopped until he had flanked Lee's army by a wide swing, made his way to the rear and joined the Confederacy.

Grant had now changed his plan of campaign. He determined to capture Petersburg by a coup and cut the communication of Lee and Richmond with the

South.

The coup failed. The ragged remnants of Lee's army which had been left there to defend it, held the trenches until reinforcements arrived.

He determined to take it by a resistless concerted assault. On the 16th he threw three of his army corps on Beauregard's thin lines before Petersburg, capturing four redoubts. At daylight, on the 17th, he again hurled his men on Beauregard and drove his men out of his first line of defense. All day the defenders held their second line, though Grant's crack divisions poured out their blood like water. As night fell the dead were once more piled high on the Federal front and the Confederate dead filled the trenches.

As the third day dawned the fierce assault was renewed, but Lee had brought up Anderson's Corps with Kershaw and Field's division and the blue waves broke against the impregnable grey ranks and rolled back, leaving the dead in dark heaps.

As the shadows of night fell, Grant withdrew his shattered lines to their trenches.

He had lost ten thousand five hundred more men and had failed.

He began to burrow his fortifications into the earth around Petersburg and try by siege what had been found impossible by assault. Further and further crept his blue lines with pick and axe and spade and shovel, digging, burrowing, piling their dirt and timbers. Before each blue rampart silently grew one in grey until the two siege lines stretched for thirty-seven miles in bristling, flaming semicircle covering both Richmond and Petersburg.

Again Grant planned a coup. He chose the role of the fox this time instead of the lion. He selected the