fire of Cemetery Hill and of an advanced Massachusetts
regiment. He saw the blue flags of Virginia sway, fall, and rise no
more, while scattered and broken the Confederates fled or fell under
the fury of the death messages from above the long-buried dead of the
village graves. "Now then, Cushing!" cried Hunt, and the guns on the
Crest opened fire.

It was plain that the long Confederate lines, frayed on each flank, had
crowded together making a vast wedge of attack. Then all along our miles
of troops a crackle of musketry broke out, the big guns bellowing. The
field was mostly lost to view in the dense smoke, under which the
charging-force halted and steadily returned the fire.

"I can't see," cried Cushing near by.

"Quite three hundred yards or more," said the colonel, "and you are hurt,
Cushing. Go to the rear." The blood was streaming down his leg.

"Not I--it is nothing. Hang those fellows!" A New York battery gallantly
run in between disabled guns crowded Cushing's cannon. He cried, "Section
one to the front, by hand!"

He was instantly obeyed. As he went with it to the front near to the
wall, followed by Penhallow, he said, "It is my last canister, colonel. I
can't see well."

Dimly seen figures in the dense smoke were visible here and there some
two hundred yards away, with flutter of reeling battle-flags in the
smoke, while more and more swiftly the wedge of men came on, losing
terribly by the fire of the men at the wall along the lines.

Cushing stood with the lanyard of the percussion trigger in his hand.
It seems inconceivable, but the two men smiled. Then he cried, "My
God!"--his figure swayed, he held his left hand over a ghastly wound
in his side, and as he reeled pulled the lanyard. He may have seen
the red flash, and then with a bullet through the open mouth fell dead
across the trail of his gun.

For a moment Penhallow was the only officer of rank near the silent
battery. Where Cushing's two guns came too near the wall, the men moved
away to the sides leaving an unguarded space. Checked everywhere to
right and left, the assailants crowded on to the clump of trees and to
where the Pennsylvania line held the stone wall. Ignorant of the ruin
behind them, the grey mass came on with a rush through the smoke. The
men in blue, losing terribly, fell back from a part of the wall in
confusion--a mere mob--sweeping Webb, Penhallow and others with them,
swearing and furious. Two or three hundred feet back