Vengeance. Now the Yankees would know what it meant to have the

war carried into their own country. Now they'd know what it meant

to have fertile fields stripped, horses and cattle stolen, houses

burned, old men and boys dragged off to prison and women and

children turned out to starve.

Everyone knew what the Yankees had done in Missouri, Kentucky,

Tennessee and Virginia. Even small children could recite with hate

and fear the horrors the Yankees had inflicted upon the conquered

territory. Already Atlanta was full of refugees from east

Tennessee, and the town had heard firsthand stories from them of

what suffering they had gone through. In that section, the

Confederate sympathizers were in the minority and the hand of war

fell heavily upon them, as it did on all the border states,

neighbor informing against neighbor and brother killing brother.

These refugees cried out to see Pennsylvania one solid sheet of

flame, and even the gentlest of old ladies wore expressions of grim

pleasure.

But when the news trickled back that Lee had issued orders that no

private property in Pennsylvania should be touched, that looting

would be punished by death and that the army would pay for every

article it requisitioned--then it needed all the reverence the

General had earned to save his popularity. Not turn the men loose

in the rich storehouses of that prosperous state? What was General

Lee thinking of? And our boys so hungry and needing shoes and

clothes and horses!

A hasty note from Darcy Meade to the doctor, the only first-hand

information Atlanta received during those first days of July, was

passed from hand to hand, with mounting indignation.

"Pa, could you manage to get me a pair of boots? I've been

barefooted for two weeks now and I don't see any prospects of

getting another pair. If I didn't have such big feet I could get

them off dead Yankees like the other boys, but I've never yet found

a Yankee whose feet were near as big as mine. If you can get me

some, don't mail them. Somebody would steal them on the way and I

wouldn't blame them. Put Phil on the train and send him up with

them. I'll write you soon, where we'll be. Right now I don't

know, except that we're marching north. We're in Maryland now and

everybody says we're going on into Pennsylvania. . . .

"Pa, I thought that we'd give the Yanks a taste of their own

medicine but the General says No, and personally I don't care to

get shot just for the pleasure of burning some Yank's house. Pa,

today we marched through the grandest cornfields you ever saw. We

don't have corn like this down home. Well, I must admit we did a

bit of private looting in that corn, for we were all pretty hungry

and what the General don't know won't hurt him. But that green

corn didn't do us a bit of good. All the boys have got dysentery

anyway, and that corn made it worse. It's easier to walk with a

leg wound than with dysentery. Pa, do try to manage some boots for

me. I'm a captain now and a captain ought to have boots, even if

he hasn't got a new uniform or epaulets."

But the army was in Pennsylvania--that was all that mattered. One

more victory and the war would be over, and then Darcy Meade could

have all the boots he wanted, and the boys would come marching home

and everybody would be happy again. Mrs. Meade's eyes grew wet as

she pictured her soldier son home at last, home to stay.

On the third of July, a sudden silence fell on the wires from the

north, a silence that lasted till midday of the fourth when

fragmentary and garbled reports began to trickle into headquarters

in Atlanta. There had been hard fighting in Pennsylvania, near a

little town named Gettysburg, a great battle with all Lee's army

massed. The news was uncertain, slow in coming, for the battle had

been fought in the enemy's territory and the reports came first

through Maryland, were relayed to Richmond and then to Atlanta.

Suspense grew and the beginnings of dread slowly crawled over the

town. Nothing was so bad as not knowing what was happening.

Families with sons at the front prayed fervently that their boys

were not in Pennsylvania, but those who knew their relatives were

in the same regiment with Darcy Meade clamped their teeth and said

it was an honor for them to be in the big fight that would lick the

Yankees for good and all.

In Aunt Pitty's house, the three women looked into one another's

eyes with fear they could not conceal. Ashley was in Darcy's

regiment.

On the fifth came evil tidings, not from the North but from the

West. Vicksburg had fallen, fallen after a long and bitter siege,

and practically all the Mississippi River, from St. Louis to New

Orleans was in the hands of the Yankees. The Confederacy had been

cut in two. At any other time, the news of this disaster would

have brought fear and lamentation to Atlanta. But now they could

give little thought to Vicksburg. They were thinking of Lee in

Pennsylvania, forcing battle. Vicksburg's loss would be no

catastrophe if Lee won in the East. There lay Philadelphia, New

York, Washington. Their capture would paralyze the North and more

than cancel off the defeat on the Mississippi.

The hours dragged by and the black shadow of calamity brooded over

the town, obscuring the hot sun until people looked up startled