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!"
For an instant the attacking Southerners stood aghast at the sight of this raging man in gray who defended a Yankee officer; and yet he had made no saber stroke to wound or kill; instead, his weapon had come between their own and the life of a well-nigh helpless foe. For a moment more they paused and looked with wondering eyes, and in that moment their victory was changed to rout.
A bugle blared. A thundering rush of hoof beats sounded on the road, and the Union reënforcements swept around the curve. Six abreast they came, a regiment of strong, straight riders, hungry for battle, hot to retrieve the losing fortune of the day. The road was too narrow for a concentrated rush, so they streamed into the fields on either side, re-formed, and swept like an avalanche of blue upon their prey. The guns in the woods now thundered forth afresh, their echoes rolling out across the hills, and the attacking Rebels turned and fled, like leaves before a storm.
On one side of the road, Morrison and Cary shrank down beside the wall to let the Union riders pass; on the other, all that was left of the Rebel force ran helter-skelter for a screen of protecting trees. But before the last one disappeared he threw up his gun and fired, haphazard, in the direction whence he had come.