"P. S.--I have often wondered what it would be like to be on the eve of
a battle. It's no different from anything else."
Abe Long and Crittenden were bunkies now. Abe's comrade, the boy
Sanders, had been wounded and sent to the rear. Reynolds, too, was shot
through the shoulder, and, despite his protests, was ordered back to the
coast.
"Oh, I'll be on hand for the next scrap," he said.
Abe and Crittenden had been side by side in the fight. It was no
surprise to Crittenden that any man was brave. By his code, a man would
be better dead than alive a coward. He believed cowardice exceptional
and the brave man the rule, but he was not prepared for Abe's coolness
and his humour. Never did the Westerner's voice change, and never did
the grim half-smile leave his eyes or his mouth. Once during the fight
he took off his hat.
"How's my hair parted?" he asked, quietly.
A Mauser bullet had mowed a path through Abe's thick, upright hair,
scraping the skin for three inches, and leaving a trail of tiny, red
drops. Crittenden turned to look and laugh, and a bullet cut through the
open flap of his shirt, just over his heart. He pointed to it.
"See the good turn you did me."
While the two were cooking supper, the old Sergeant came up.
"If you don't obey orders next time," he said to Crittenden, sternly,
for Abe was present, "I'll report you to the Captain." Crittenden had
declined to take shelter during the fight--it was a racial inheritance
that both the North and the South learned to correct in the old war.
"That's right, Governor," said Abe.
"The Colonel himself wanted to know what damn fool that was standing out
in the road. He meant you."
"All right, Sergeant," Crittenden said.
When he came in from guard duty, late that night, he learned that Basil
was safe. He lay down with a grateful heart, and his thoughts, like the
thoughts of every man in that tropical forest, took flight for home.
Life was getting very simple now for him--death, too, and duty. Already
he was beginning to wonder at his old self and, with a shock, it came to
him that there were but three women in the world to him--Phyllis and his
mother--and Judith. He thought of the night of the parting, and it
flashed for the first time upon him that Judith might have taken the
shame that he felt reddening his face as shame for her, and not for
himself: and a pain shot through him so keen that he groaned aloud.