Baillie did not perfectly understand the purpose of this, but he understood his orders, and very promptly obeyed them. Advancing his guns quickly to a little knoll thirty or forty yards in front, he opened fire with double charges of canister, each gun firing at the rate of three or four times a minute, and each vomiting a gallon of iron balls at each discharge into the faces of a line of men not a hundred yards away. At the same moment the riflemen of the skirmish-line rose to their feet, rushed forward with a yell that impressed Baillie as truly demoniacal, and delivered a murderous volley of Minie balls in aid of his canister. The combined fire was irresistible, as it was meant to be, and the Federal skirmishers fell back in some confusion in face of it.
Then the cool-headed leader of the skirmishers turned to Baillie and commanded:
"Now be quick. Take your guns across the creek at once. They'll be on us again in a minute with reinforcements, but I'll hold them back till you get the guns across—"
He had not finished his order when he fell, with a bullet in his brain, and his men, picking him up, laid him limply across his horse, which two of them hurried to the rear, passing within ten feet of Baillie Pegram as he struggled to get his guns across the run without wetting his ammunition.
"Poor, gallant fellow!" thought Baillie, as the corpse was borne past him. "He was only a captain, but he would have made himself a major-general presently, with his coolness and his determination. He died too soon!"
Meanwhile Baillie was busy executing the order that the dead man had given with his last breath, while some other was in command out there in front and struggling to protect the guns till they could pass the stream.
It is always so in life. No man is indispensable. When one man falls at the post of duty, there is always some other to take his place. "Men may come and men may go," but the work that men were born to do "goes on for ever."
As Baillie was directing the struggles of his drivers in the difficult task of recrossing the stream, three shells burst over him in so quick a succession that he did not know from which of them came the fragment that cut a great gash in his head and rendered him for the moment senseless. He recovered himself quickly, and this was fortunate, for his untrained and inexperienced men were far less steady in retreat under fire than they had been out there in front, and Baillie's direction was needed now to prevent them from abandoning in panic the guns with which they had fought so gallantly a few minutes before.
Under his sharply given commands they recovered their morale, and a few minutes later Baillie brought his powder-grimed guns again into position on the left of the battery. Then, half-blinded by the blood that was flowing freely over his face and clothing, he sought his captain, raised his hand in salute, and said, feebly:
"Captain, I beg to report that I have executed my orders. My men have behaved well, every—"