Crittenden

Grafton sat, sobered and saddened, where he was awhile. The moon swung

upward white and peaceful, toward mild-eyed stars. Crickets chirped in

the grass around him, and nature's low night-music started in the wood

and the valley below, as though the earth had never known the hell of

fire and human passion that had rocked it through that day. Was there so

much difference between the creatures of the earth and the creatures of

his own proud estate? Had they not both been on the same brute level

that day? And, save for the wounded and the men who had comrades wounded

and dead, were not the unharmed as careless, almost as indifferent as

cricket and tree-toad to the tragedies of their sphere? Had there been

any inner change in any man who had fought that day that was not for the

worse? Would he himself get normal again, he wondered? Was there one

sensitive soul who fully realized the horror of that day? If so, he

would better have been at home.

The one fact that stood above every

thought that had come to him that day was the utter, the startling

insignificance of death. Could that mean much more than a startlingly

sudden lowering of the estimate put upon human life? Across the hollow

behind him and from a tall palm over the Spanish trenches, rose, loud

and clear, the night-song of a mocking-bird. Over there the little men

in blue were toiling, toiling, toiling at their trenches; and along the

crest of the hill the big men in blue were toiling, toiling, toiling at

theirs. All through the night anxious eyes would be strained for

Chaffee, and at dawn the slaughter would begin again. Wherever he

looked, he could see with his mind's eye stark faces in the long grass

of the valley and the Spanish-bayonet clumps in the woods. All day he

had seen them there--dying of thirst, bleeding to death--alone. As he

went down the hill, lights were moving along the creek bed. A row of

muffled dead lay along the bed of the creek. Yet they were still

bringing in dead and wounded--a dead officer with his will and a letter

to his wife clasped in his hand. He had lived long enough to write them.

Hollow-eyed surgeons were moving here and there. Up the bank of the

creek, a voice rose: "Come on, boys"--appealingly--"you're not going back on me. Come on, you

cursed cowards! Good! Good! I take it back, boys. Now we've got 'em!"

Another voice: "Kill me, somebody--kill me. For God's sake, kill me.

Won't somebody give me a pistol? God--God...."