hind their half-built
breastwork preparatory to giving battle. There was even then time, if
prompt action had been taken, for a staff officer to gallop to the front,
before the firing began, with a peremptory order for Conrad and Lane to
get out of the way; but Cox, fresh from a personal conference with
Schofield, to whom he had reported the situation and whose orders he had
received with reference to holding the position, looked quietly on and
thereby approved of Wagner's action.

It was a pleasant, hazy, Indian summer day, and so warm that I was
carrying my overcoat on my arm. When the line squatted down I folded the
coat into a compact bundle and placed it on the edge of the bank in rear
of my company and sat on it, with my feet in the shallow ditch. By craning
my neck, I could look over our low parapet. The battle was opened by a
rebel cannon, which, unnoticed by us, had taken position on a wooded knoll
off our left front over towards the river. The first shot from this cannon
flew a little high, directly over the angle where I was sitting. The
second shot dropped short, and I was thinking with a good deal of
discomfort that the third shot would get the exact range and would
probably lift some of us out of that angle; but before it came our line
had opened fire on the approaching rebel line and I became so much
interested in that fire that I never knew whether there was a third shot
from the cannon.

Our fire checked them in front, for they halted and began to return it,
but for a minute only, for, urged on by their officers they again came
forward. Their advance was so rapid that my company had fired only five or
six rounds to the man when the break came. The salient of our line was
near the pike and there the opposing lines met in a hand-to-hand encounter
in which clubbed muskets were used, but our line quickly gave way. I had
been glancing uneasily along our line, watching for a break as a pretext
for getting out of there, and was looking towards the pike when the break
first started. It ran along the line so rapidly that it reminded me of a
train of powder burning. I instantly sprang to my feet and looked to the
front. They were coming on the run, emitting the shrill rebel charging
yell, and so close that my first impulse was to throw myself flat on the
ground and let them charge over us. But the rear was open and a sense of
duty, as well as a thought of the horrors endured in rebel prisons,
constrained me to t