“Bid them move on, De Courcy,” he said in a faint voice, as he remarked the sudden check which had been given to the advance by his fall.  Then, as if obedient to the command, they renewed the ascent, each man eyeing him as he past with a look in which deep sorrow and a desire to avenge his death were intimately blended.  “Forty-Ninth, I have served with you from boyhood, and if ye would I die with honor this day—­carry those heights.”

There was a deep murmur through the ranks of both companies, that showed how each and all were affected by this appealing address of the dying officer.  At that moment there arose a loud shout from the hill, as of triumph at the fall of him they mourned.  They answered it with the fierce expression of men resolved to turn that shout of triumph into a cry of woe; and excited, maddened, infuriated, yet with a steadiness of movement that claimed the admiration even of their enemies, dashed, heedless of the galling fire of the riflemen, up the steep.

Left alone with the dying General, it became a first consideration with the young officers to convey him (provided he could bear removal) to some spot out of reach of the enemy’s fire, where he might breathe his last moments in peace.

As Henry Grantham glanced his eye towards an old untenanted building, that lay some fifty yards off the road, and which he conceived fully adapted to the purpose, he saw the form of a rifleman partly exposed at a corner of the building, whose action at the moment was evidently that of one in the act of loading his piece.  The idea that this skulking enemy might have been the same who had given the fatal death-wound to his beloved Chief, added to the conviction that he was preparing to put the coup de grace to his work, filled him with the deepest desire of vengeance.  As the bodies of several men, picked off by the tirailleurs, lay along the road, (one at no great distance from the spot on which he stood,) he hastened to secure the nearest musket, which, as no shot had yet been fired by the English, he knew to be loaded.

Leaving De Courcy to support the head of the General, the young Aid-de-Camp moved with due caution towards the building; but ere he had gone ten paces, he beheld the object of his pursuit issue altogether from the cover of the building, and advance towards him with his rifle at the trail.  More and more convinced that his design was to obtain a nearer approach, with a view to a more certain aim, he suddenly halted, and raised the musket to his shoulder.  In vain was a shout to desist uttered by the advancing man—­in vain was his rifle thrown aside as if in token of the absence of all hostile purpose.  The excited Henry Grantham heeded not the words—­saw not the action.  He thought only of the danger of his General, and of his desire to avenge his fall.  He fired—­the rifleman staggered, and putting his hand to his breast—­

“My brother! oh, my unhappy brother!” he exclaimed, and sank senseless to the earth.