And now the shriek of the shells and the whine of the bullets came shriller than before.  All around them the twigs were dropping, while the acrid powder smoke rolled in through the trees and burnt their eyes and throats.  Again came men in blue retreating and among them an officer on horseback, wheeling his animal madly around among them and shouting encouragement as he tried to face them to the front.  “Keep at it, men,” Morrison was crying, half mad with rage.  “One decent stand and we can hold them.  Give it to them hard.  Stand, I tell you. Stand!”

All around him, however, men were falling and those who were left began to waver.  “Steady, men!  Don’t flinch,” came the shout again.  “Ah-hah, you would, would you? Coward!”

Morrison’s sword held flatwise, thudded down on the back of a man who had flung away his gun.  “Get back in the fight, you dog!  Get back!”

He whipped out his revolver and pointed it till the gun had been snatched up, then fired all its chambers at the oncoming hordes in gray.

“One more stand,” he yelled.  “One more—­”

Beside him the color sergeant gave a moan and bent in the middle like a hinge.  Another slackening of his body and the stricken bearer of the flag plunged from his saddle, the colors trailing in the dust.

Morrison spurred his mount toward the fallen man, bending to grasp the colors from the tight gripped hand; but even as he bent, his horse went down.  He leaped to save himself, then turned once more, snatched at the flag of his routed regiment and waved it above his head.

“Stand, boys, and give it to ’em!”

A shout went up—­not from the men he sought to rally to his flag, but from those who would win it at a cost of blood, for his troopers were running on a backward road, and Morrison fought alone.  The “gray devils” were all around him now, and he backed against the wall, fighting till his sword was sent spinning from his fist by the blow of a musket butt; then, grasping the color-pole in both his hands, he parried bayonet thrusts and saber strokes, panting, breathing in hot, labored gasps, and cursing his enemies from a hoarse, parched throat.

A hideous, unequal fight it was, and soon Lieutenant-Colonel Morrison must fall as his colors fell and be trampled in the dust; yet now through an eddying drift of smoke came another ragged Southerner, a grim, gaunt man whose voice was as hoarse as Morrison’s, who had grasped a saber from the blood stained rocks and waved it above his head.

“Back, boys!  Don’t kill that man!”

Among them he plunged till he reached the side of Morrison, then turned and faced the brothers of his country and his State.  With a downward stroke he arrested a saber thrusts and then struck upward at a rifle’s mouth as it spit its deadly flame.

“Don’t kill him!  Do you hear?” he cried, as he beat at the bayonet points.  “I’m Cary!  Herbert Cary!—­on the staff of General Lee!”