The Choir Invisible

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.