The men as they advanced sought instinctively such cover as they could, skipping from tree to tree. Every once in a while, however, one of them would expose himself in the open, and the exposure was always followed by a shot which more than once caught its mark. The crest was bare of trees, and the command arrived at the edge of the clearing with some loss, and cautiously concentrated, hesitating a moment before breaking out into the open and rushing the hill.
"Now, men," said Kirke, "you see what we have to do. The quicker we do it the better for us. Give me that flag," he added, turning to the color-bearer. "Gibson,"—to his bugler,—"stand by to sound the charge when I give the signal."
There was nothing dramatic about Kirke, it was all a matter of pure business with him; but the men thought they had never seen so splendid a figure as he when he tore off his cap, jerked his revolver from his belt, seized the flag with his left hand, and stepped out in the open.
He nodded his head to the alert Gibson, and the shrill notes of the charge echoed through the hills. Ere it had died away the men heard their colonel say, "Come on!"
It was always Kirke's way to say "Come" rather than "Go."
With a mighty roar they sprang from the shelter of the trees and dashed for the ridge. A terrific volley greeted them. With a crash like thunder, which echoed and re-echoed through the hills, the Confederate fire was poured upon them. Had it not been that most of the men, firing down the hill, overshot the mark, the "Lambs" would have been blown into eternity. As it was, many of them fell, but the rest plunged dauntlessly into the smoke through which the red of the flag could dimly be discerned waving in the advance.
Again the rifles of the brigade cracked out, and this time sent their messengers of death crashing full into the face of Kirke's men. This time the carnage was terrible; there were many dead, but the blood of the living was up: they would have charged a moving express train. They tore recklessly through the smoke toward the top, following the flag.
Before the rifles could be reloaded the "Lambs" were at the breastwork, Kirke still in the lead. To leap the log walls was the work of a moment. The brigade was ready for them. The carbines cracked again and again; there was a grim, ghastly, awful struggle on the top of that hill around the foot of the Confederate flag-staff—then silence.
When the fighting stopped the few "Lambs" who were left leaned panting on their carbines, blood dripping from the gunstocks, surveying the tangled mass of dead and dying. The brigade had been annihilated.
Broadhead sprang to the staff to haul down the flag. He was nonplussed to find that there were no halliards, and that some one had evidently climbed a tree, which had been denuded of its limbs for the purpose, and nailed the flag there. He turned to look for Kirke, when, in the smoke that yet covered the field, he distinctly saw the man lift his revolver, pull its trigger, and blow out his brains.