"One more--" Beside him the color sergeant gave a moan and bent in the middle like a hinge.

Another slackening of his body and the stricken bearer of the flag plunged from his saddle, the colors trailing in the dust.
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.