Under Fire: A Tale of the Shenandoah Valley — page 41: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

34 A TERRIBLE CATASTROPHE. to a deeper sentiment and tempered enthusiasm with a stern resolution, like that which knit the brows of the people, and compressed their lips, on the evening of the fight of Concord and Lexington in 1776. President Lincoln had already issued his call to the Governors of the States in sympathy with the North for 75,000 men to serve for three months. And the call was answered with a readiness and. spirit that clearly showed the temper of the people. . From that hour events followed one another with startling rapidity, gradually ascending in the scale of importance as the warlike operations broadened; and before many weeks the entire country was wide awake to the fact that a war, that would be far reach- ing in its effects, was upon the nation. During the first few weeks of the strugele, when both sides were, we may say, girding their loins, for the first desperate grapple, the hero of this story, Royal Chetwood, whom Major de Banyan and Cap- tain T'rafton had left for dead on the old stone turn- pike, was lying in the City Hospital at Charleston. Moses Bluff, the brother of the murdered victim of the captain’s sensualism, had, as we have already seen, found his inanimate body on the spot where he fell. Finding that the young man’s heart was still faintly beating, he had carefully brought him into the city © and to the hospital. | For more than a week, Royal’s life was despaired of. The bullet had passed through his body, just above the heart, and the wound was of the most dangerous character. Thanks to a robust constitution and the best of medical treatment, he slowly rallied, but for a long time looked the mere ghost of his former self. Moses Bluff, who had traced his sister to Charles- ton, divided his time between his search for Mary, of comicbooks (E(e@)