What they did or what he did, he never remembered.

He has heard men say many times that he whispered his message, grabbed a carbine, and came tearing through the brush back to the town.
All that is important to know of the battle of Sycamore Ridge is that Philemon Ward, called out of bed with the town to fight that summer morning, took command before he had dressed, and when the town was threatened with a charge from a second division of the enemy, Bemis and Captain Lee of the Red Legs, Watts McHurdie, Madison Hendricks, Oscar Fernald, and Gabriel Carnine, under the command of Philemon Ward, ran to the top of the high bank of the Sycamore, and there held a deep cut made for the stage road,--held it as a pass against a half-hundred horsemen, floundering under the bank, in the underbrush below, who dared not file up the pass.
The little boy standing at the window of his mother's house saw this.
But all the firing in the town, all the forming and charging and skirmishing that was done that hot August day in '60, either he did not see, or if he saw it, the memory faded under the great terror that gripped his soul when he saw his mother in danger.

Ward in his undershirt was standing by a tree near the stage road above the bank.
The firing in the creek bed had stopped.

His back was toward the town, and then, out of some place dim in the child's mind--from the troop southwest of town perhaps--came a charge of galloping horsemen, riding down on Ward.

The others with him had found cover, and he, seeing the enemy before him and behind him, pistol in hand, alone charged into the advancing horsemen.