He looked up quickly, confusedly, at her with a refusal on his lips; but she
had already turned away to get the needful things in readiness, and he
suffered her, if for no other reason than to avoid letting her see the
painful rush of blood to his face. As she moved about the room, she spoke
only to ask unavoidable questions; he, only to answer them; and neither
looked at the other.
Then he sat up in the bed and bared his neck and shoulder, one arm and half
his chest; and with his face crimson, turned his eyes away. She had been
among the women in the fort during that summer thirteen years before, when
the battle of the Blue Licks had been fought; and speaking in the quietest,
most natural of voices, she now began to describe how the wounded had
straggled in from the battle-field; one rifleman reeling on his horse and
held in his seat by the arm of a comrade, his bleeding, bandaged head on
that comrade's shoulder; another borne on a litter swung between two horses;
others --footmen--holding out just long enough to come into sight of the
fort, there to sink down; one, a mere youth, fallen a mile back in the hot
dusty buffalo trace with an unspoken message to some one in his brave,
beautiful, darkening eyes. But before this, she told him how the women had
watched all that night and the day previous inside the poor little
earth-mound of a defence against artillery, built by order of Jefferson and
costing $37.5O; the women taking as always the places of the men who were
gone away to the war; becoming as always the defenders of the land, of the
children, of those left behind sick or too old to fight. How from the black
edge of dawn they had strained their eyes in the direction of the battle
until at last a woman's cry of agony had rent the air as the first of the
wounded had ridden slowly into sight. How they had rushed forth through the
wooden gates and heard the tidings of it all and then had followed the
scenes and the things that could never be told for pity and grief and love
and sadness.
After a little pause she began to speak of Major Falconer as the
school-master had never known her to speak; tremulously of his part in that
battle, a Revolutionary officer serving as a common backwoods soldier;
eloquently of his perfect courage then and always, of his perfect manliness;
and she ended by saying that the worst thing that could ever befall a woman
was to marry an unmanly man.