As the men were clambering up the parapet their color-sergeant was shot dead, the colors trailing stained and wet in the dust beside him.  Ercildoune, who was just behind, sprang forward, seized the staff from his dying hand, and mounted with it upward.  A ball struck his right arm, yet ere it could fall shattered by his side, his left hand caught the flag and carried it onward.  Even in the mad sweep of assault and death the men around him found breath and time to hurrah, and those behind him pressed more gallantly forward to follow such a lead.  He kept in his place, the colors flying,—­though faint with loss of blood and wrung with agony,—­up the slippery steep; up to the walls of the fort; on the wall itself, planting the flag where the men made that brief, splendid stand, and melted away like snow before furnace-heat.  Here a bayonet thrust met him and brought him down, a great wound in his brave breast, but he did not yield; dropping to his knees, pressing his unbroken arm upon the gaping wound,—­bracing himself against a dead comrade,—­the colors still flew; an inspiration to the men about him; a defiance to the foe.

At last when the shattered ranks fell back, sullenly and slowly retreating, it was seen by those who watched him,—­men lying for three hundred rods around in every form of wounded suffering,—­that he was painfully working his way downward, still holding aloft the flag, bent evidently on saving it, and saving it as flag had rarely, if ever, been saved before.

Some of the men had crawled, some had been carried, some hastily caught up and helped by comrades to a sheltered tent out of range of the fire; a hospital tent, they called it, if anything could bear that name which was but a place where men could lie to suffer and expire, without a bandage, a surgeon, or even a drop of cooling water to moisten parched and dying lips.  Among these was Jim.  He had a small field-glass in his pocket, and forgot or ignored his pain in his eager interest of watching through this the progress of the man and the flag, and reporting accounts to his no less eager companions.  Black soldiers and white were alike mad with excitement over the deed; and fear lest the colors which had not yet dipped should at last bite the ground.

Now and then he paused at some impediment:  it was where the dead and dying were piled so thickly as to compel him to make a detour.  Now and then he rested a moment to press his arm tighter against his torn and open breast.  The rain fell in such torrents, the evening shadows were gathering so thickly, that they could scarcely trace his course, long before it was ended.

Slowly, painfully, he dragged himself onward,—­step by step down the hill, inch by inch across the ground,—­to the door of the hospital; and then, while dying eyes brightened,—­dying hands and even shattered stumps were thrown into the air,—­in brief, while dying men held back their souls from the eternities to cheer him,—­gasped out, “I did—­but do—­my duty, boys,—­and the dear—­old flag—­never once—­touched the ground,”—­and then, away from the reach and sight of its foes, in the midst of its defenders, who loved and were dying for it, the flag at last fell.