“Rifles!” exclaimed Gibbon.  “Good!” Their left made no reply, but seemed to draw away from the fire.

“I can see no more,” said the Colonel, “but they stopped at the Emmitsburg road.”

The acrid odour of musketry drifted across the field as he turned to gaze at the left wing of the fast coming onset.  Far to our right they came under the fire of Cemetery Hill and of an advanced Massachusetts regiment.  He saw the blue flags of Virginia sway, fall, and rise no more, while scattered and broken the Confederates fled or fell under the fury of the death messages from above the long-buried dead of the village graves.  “Now then, Cushing!” cried Hunt, and the guns on the Crest opened fire.

It was plain that the long Confederate lines, frayed on each flank, had crowded together making a vast wedge of attack.  Then all along our miles of troops a crackle of musketry broke out, the big guns bellowing.  The field was mostly lost to view in the dense smoke, under which the charging-force halted and steadily returned the fire.

“I can’t see,” cried Cushing near by.

“Quite three hundred yards or more,” said the colonel, “and you are hurt, Cushing.  Go to the rear.”  The blood was streaming down his leg.

“Not I—­it is nothing.  Hang those fellows!” A New York battery gallantly run in between disabled guns crowded Cushing’s cannon.  He cried, “Section one to the front, by hand!”

He was instantly obeyed.  As he went with it to the front near to the wall, followed by Penhallow, he said, “It is my last canister, colonel.  I can’t see well.”

Dimly seen figures in the dense smoke were visible here and there some two hundred yards away, with flutter of reeling battle-flags in the smoke, while more and more swiftly the wedge of men came on, losing terribly by the fire of the men at the wall along the lines.

Cushing stood with the lanyard of the percussion trigger in his hand.  It seems inconceivable, but the two men smiled.  Then he cried, “My God!”—­his figure swayed, he held his left hand over a ghastly wound in his side, and as he reeled pulled the lanyard.  He may have seen the red flash, and then with a bullet through the open mouth fell dead across the trail of his gun.

For a moment Penhallow was the only officer of rank near the silent battery.  Where Cushing’s two guns came too near the wall, the men moved away to the sides leaving an unguarded space.  Checked everywhere to right and left, the assailants crowded on to the clump of trees and to where the Pennsylvania line held the stone wall.  Ignorant of the ruin behind them, the grey mass came on with a rush through the smoke.  The men in blue, losing terribly, fell back from a part of the wall in confusion—­a mere mob—­sweeping Webb, Penhallow and others with them, swearing and furious.  Two or three hundred feet back they stopped, a confused mass.  General Webb, Haskell and other officers rallied them.  The red flags gathered thicker, where the small units of many commands stood fast under the shelter of a portion of the lost wall.  Penhallow looked back and saw the Massachusetts flags—­our centre alone had given way.  The flanks of the broken regiments still held the wall and poured in a murderous fire where the splendid courage of the onset halted, unwilling to fly, unable to go on.