hundered again, and then as he looked through the gray
torch made, starlighted night, he quailed in a cold sickening fear,
for the old man who led them on was his grandsire, the man whom of
all on earth he loved and revered the most.

Eight guns, with grim muzzles trained on the old rider and his
charging column, waited but for the captain's word to hurl their
double-shotted canisters of death.

And Tom Travis, in the agony of it, stood, sword in hand, stricken in
dumbness and doubt. On came the column, the old warrior leading
them--on and:--

"The command--the command! Give it to us, Captain," shouted the
gunners.

"_Cease firing!_"

The gunners dropped their lanyards with an oath, trained machines
that they were.

It was a drunken German who brought a heavy sword-hilt down on the
young officer's head with:

"You damned traitor!"

A gleam of gun and bayonet leaped in the misty light in front, from
shoulder to breast--a rock wall, tipped with steel swept crushingly
forward over the trenches over the breastworks.

Under the guns, senseless, his skull crushed, an upturned face
stopped the old warrior. Down from his horse he came with a weak,
hysterical sob.

"O Tom--Tom, I might have known it was you--my gallant, noble boy--my
Irish Gray!"

He kissed, as he thought, the dead face, and went on with his men.

It was just midnight.

"At midnight, all being quiet in front, in accordance with orders
from the commanding Generals," writes General J. D. Cox in his
official report, "I withdrew my command to the north bank of the
river."

"The battle closed about twelve o'clock at night," wrote General
Hood, "when the enemy retreated rapidly on Nashville, leaving the
dead and wounded in our hands. We captured about a thousand prisoners
and several stands of colors."

Was this a coincidence--or as some think--did the boys in blue
retreat before they would fire on an old Continental and the spirit
of '76?

An hour afterwards a negro was sadly leading a tired old man on a
superb horse back to headquarters, and as the rider's head sank on
his breast he said:

"Lead me, Bisco, I'm too weak to guide my horse. Nothing is left now
but the curse of it."

And O, the curse of it!

Fifty-seven Union dead beside the wounded, in the little front yard
of the Carter House, alone. And they lay around the breastworks from
river to river, a chain of dead and dying. In front of the
breastworks was another chain--a wider a