McClellan counted his tremendous losses, and he, too, preferred to await attack rather than offer it.

His old obsession that his enemy was double his real strength seized him, and he was not willing to risk his army in a second rush upon Lee.
While Dick and his comrades were waiting through the long morning hours, Lee and Jackson and his other lieutenants were deciding whether or not they should make an attack of their own.

But when they studied with their glasses the Northern lines and the great batteries, they decided that it would be better not to try it.
When noon came and still no shot had been fired, Colonel Winchester shook his head.
"We might yet destroy the Southern army," he said to Dick, "but I'm convinced that General McClellan will not move it." The hot afternoon passed, and then the night came with the sound of rumbling wheels and marching men.

Dick surmised that Lee was leaving the peninsula, and, crossing the Potomac in to Virginia, and that therefore tactical victory would rest with the Northern side.

The noises continued all night long, but McClellan made no advance, nor did he do so the next day, while the whole Confederate army was crossing the Potomac, until nearly night.
But the Winchester regiment and several more of the same skeleton character, pushing forward a little on the morning of that day, found that the last Confederate soldier was gone from Sharpsburg.