By dusk the Confederates had done the improbable: with a fraction of their strength, they had driven the Union left back and held the field. On paper it was a tactical victory. And right at the end came the most theatrical moment of the day. At Dixville Crossroads, where the Benton and Mackville roads met north of town, the last Confederate assault ran into a fresh Union line, the 22nd Indiana. Polk, riding forward in the failing light, blundered directly into that enemy regiment. Rather than bolt, he is said to have brazened it out, posing as a Union officer, bluffing the men long enough to ride clear, and then calling off the attack on account of the darkness.

The Polk bluff is a colorful, much-repeated story; the details come down to us secondhand, so take it as reported rather than documented to the word.

It was, finally, too late in the day for either side to do more. Union reinforcements had at last begun arriving, and a pursuit toward the Perryville cemetery pushed forward before Gilbert, true to the whole day, halted it. The guns fell quiet in the dark with the Confederates holding the ground they had fought over.

And then Braxton Bragg (South) did the thing that turned his victory to ash. That night he walked the cold ground and read his own position, and what he read was a trap closing. A fresh Union corps under Major General Thomas L. Crittenden (North) had sat out the entire battle on his flank to the south, uncommitted, and was poised to fall on him. Gilbert’s corps held the center. And the rest of Buell’s enormous army, the one the acoustic shadow had kept out of the fight, was now arriving in force. Bragg was outnumbered perhaps three to one, low on ammunition, and short of food, with no Kentucky base rising up behind him to resupply from, because the Kentucky he’d come to liberate had stayed home. He had bloodied one corner of a giant. He had not beaten the giant. To stand and finish it the next morning would be to fight the whole Army of the Ohio with sixteen thousand men.

So he left. And the cost of that decision had a face: scattered through the town and the farmhouses lay around nine hundred of his own wounded, men shot taking Open Knob, too broken to move, and in the night Bragg abandoned every one of them to the enemy. The army that had won the field marched away from its own bleeding to save itself. It pulled back to join Kirby Smith’s force, and from there the whole invasion drained back out of the state: southeast through the Cumberland Gap toward Knoxville and Tennessee. The Confederate Heartland Offensive was over. The bid for Kentucky was finished. The man who had held the field walked away from it and gave up the state the field was supposed to win.