Back and forth before the line, the general of the brigade was riding bareheaded and frantic with delight. As he passed he made sweeping gestures with his left hand, and his long gray hair floated like a banner upon the wind.
“They're coming, men!” he cried. “Get behind that fence and have your muskets ready to pick your man. When you see the whites of his eyes fire, and give the bayonet. They're coming! Here they are!”
The old “worm” fence went down, and as Dan piled up some loose rails before him, a creeping brier tore his fingers until the blood spurted upon his sleeve. Then, kneeling on the ground, he raised his musket and fired at one of the skirmishers advancing briskly through the broom-sedge. In an instant the meadow and the hill beyond were blue with swarming infantry, and the little gray band fell back, step by step, loading and firing as it went across the field. As the road behind it closed, Dan turned to battle on his own account, and entering a thinned growth of pines, he dodged from tree to tree and aimed above the brushwood. Near him the colour bearer of the regiment was fighting with his flagstaff for a weapon, and out in the meadow a member of the glee club, crouching behind a clump of sassafras as he loaded, was singing in a cracked voice:—
“Rally round the flag, boys, rally once again!”
Then a bullet went with a soft thud into the singer's breast, and the cracked voice was choked out beneath the bushes.
Gripped by a sudden pity for the helpless flag he had loved and followed for four years, Dan made an impetuous dash from out the pines, and tearing the colours from the pole, tossed them over his arm as he retreated rapidly to cover. At the instant he held his life as nothing beside the faded strip of silk that wrapped about his body. The cause for which he had fought, the great captain he had followed, the devotion to a single end which had kept him struggling in the ranks, the daily sacrifice, the very poverty and cold and hunger, all these were bound up and made one with the tattered flag upon his arm. Through the belt of pines, down the muddy road, across the creek and up the long hill, he fell back breathlessly, loading and firing as he went, with his face turned toward the enemy. At the end he became like a fox before the hunters, dashing madly over the rough ground, with the colours blown out behind him, and the quick shots ringing in his ears.
Then, as if by a single stroke, Lee's army vanished from the trampled broom-sedge and the strip of pines. The blue brigades closed upon the landscape and when they opened there were only a group of sullen prisoners and the sound of stray shots from the scattered soldiers who had fought their way beyond the stream.