"Charge, pieces!" It was Tom Travis who commanded the guns where the Columbia Pike met the breastworks at the terrible deadly locust thicket. All night he had stood at his post and stopped nine desperate charges. All night in the flash and roar and the strange uncanny smell of blood and black powder smoke, he had stood among the dead and dying calling stubbornly, monotonously: "Ready!" "Aim!" "Fire!" And now it was nearly midnight and Schofield, finding the enemy checked, was withdrawing on Nashville. Tom Travis thought the battle was over, but in the glare and flash he looked and saw another column, ghostly gray in the starlight, moving stubbornly at his guns. "Ready!" he shouted as his gunners sprang again to their pieces. On came the column--beautifully on. How it thrilled him to see them! How it hurt to think they were his people! "_Aim!_" he thundered 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: