“The Seventy-Eighth and Twentieth Ohio, our right and left bowers, who had been brigaded with us ever since ‘Shiloh,’ were into it as hot and heavy as we had been, and had lost numbers of their officers and men, but were hanging on to their little rail piles when the fight was over.  At one time the Rebs were right in on top of the Seventy-Eighth.  One big Reb grabbed their colors, and tried to pull them out of the hands of the color-bearer.  But old Captain Orr, a little, short, dried-up fellow, about sixty years old, struck him with his sword across the back of the neck, and killed him deader than a mackerel, right in his tracks.

“It was now getting dark, and the Johnnies concluded they had taken a bigger contract in trying to drive us off that hill in one day than they had counted on, so they quit charging on us, but drew back under cover of the woods and along the old line of works that we had left, and kept up a pecking away and sharp-shooting at us all night long.  They opened fire on us from a number of pieces of artillery from the front, from the left, and from some heavy guns away over to the right of us, in the main works around Atlanta.

“We did not fool away much time that night, either.  We got our shovels and picks, and while part of us were sharpshooting and trying to keep the Rebels from working up too close to us, the rest of the boys were putting up some good solid earthworks right where our rail piles had been, and by morning we were in splendid shape to have received our friends, no matter which way they had come at us, for they kept up such an all-fired shelling of us from so many different directions; that the boys had built traverses and bomb-proofs at all sorts of angles and in all directions.

“There was one point off to our right, a few rods up along our old line of works where there was a crowd of Rebel sharpshooters that annoyed us more than all the rest, by their constant firing at us through the night.  They killed one of Company H’s boys, and wounded several others.  Finally Captain Williams, of D Company, came along and said he wanted a couple of good shots out of our company to go with him, so I went for one.  He took about ten of us, and we crawled down into the ravine in front of where we were building the works, and got behind a large fallen tree, and we laid there and could just fire right up into the rear of those fellows as they lay behind a traverse extending back from our old line of works.  It was so dark we could only see where to fire by the flash of guns, but every time they would shoot, some of us would let them have one.  They staid there until almost daylight, when they, concluded as things looked, since we were going to stay, they had better be going.