his father, who returned the
salute with a stately courtesy which masked a breaking heart, left the
home of his childhood to go soldiering. By conscience and courage, by
deeds of devotion and daring, he soon commended himself to his fellows
and his officers; and it was to these qualities and to some knowledge of
the country that he owed his selection for his present perilous duty
at the extreme outpost. Nevertheless, fatigue had been stronger than
resolution, and he had fallen asleep. What good or bad angel came in
a dream to rouse him from his state of crime, who shall say? Without a
movement, without a sound, in the profound silence and the languor
of the late afternoon, some invisible messenger of fate touched with
unsealing finger the eyes of his consciousness--whispered into the ear
of his spirit the mysterious awakening word which no human lips ever
have spoken, no human memory ever has recalled. He quietly raised
his forehead from his arm and looked between the masking stems of the
laurels, instinctively closing his right hand about the stock of his
rifle.

His first feeling was a keen artistic delight. On a colossal pedestal,
the cliff,--motionless at the extreme edge of the capping rock
and sharply outlined against the sky,--was an equestrian statue of
impressive dignity. The figure of the man sat the figure of the horse,
straight and soldierly, but with the repose of a Grecian god carted in
the marble which limits the suggestion of activity. The gray costume
harmonized with its aerial background; the metal of accoutrement and
caparison was softened and subdued by the shadow; the animal's skin had
no points of high light. A carbine, strikingly foreshortened, lay across
the pommel of the saddle, kept in place by the right hand grasping it
at the "grip"; the left hand, holding the bridle rein, was invisible.
In silhouette against the sky, the profile of the horse was cut with
the sharpness of a cameo; it looked across the heights of air to the
confronting cliffs beyond. The face of the rider, turned slightly away,
showed only an outline of temple and beard; he was looking downward to
the bottom of the valley. Magnified by its lift against the sky and by
the soldier's testifying sense of the formidableness of a near enemy,
the group appeared of heroic, almost colossal, size.

For an instant Druse had a strange, half-defined feeling that he had
slept to the end of the war and was looking upon a noble work of art