fingers. Here and there a child
held a glass of water to a man who could not raise himself, or sat fanning
the flies from a pallid face. None was too old nor too young where there
was work for all.

A stir passed through the group about the long pine table, and one of the
surgeons, wiping the sweat from his brow, came over to where Dan lay, and
stopped to take breath beside the window.

"By Jove, that man died game," he said, shaking his handkerchief at the
flies. "We took both his legs off at the knee, and he just gripped the
table hard and never winked an eyelash. I told him it would kill him, but
he said he'd be hanged if he didn't take his chance--and he took it and
died. Talk to me about nerve, that fellow had the cleanest grit I ever
saw."

Dan's pulses fluttered, as they always did at an example of pure pluck.

"What's his regiment?" he asked, watching the two slaves who, followed by
their mistresses, were bringing the body back to the stretcher.

"Oh, he was a scout, I believe, serving with Stuart when he was wounded.
His name is--by the way, his name is Montjoy. Any relative of yours, I
wonder?"

Raising himself upon his elbow, Dan turned to look at the dead man beside
him. A heavy beard covered the mouth and chin, but he knew the sunken black
eyes and the hair that was like his own.

"Yes," he answered after a long pause, "he is a relative of mine, I think;"
and then, while the man lay waiting for his coffin, he propped himself upon
his arm and followed curiously the changes made by death.

At his first recognition there had come only a wave of repulsion--the old
disgust that had always dogged the memory of his father; then, with the
dead face before his eyes, he was aware of an unreasoning pride in the
blood he bore--in the fact that the soldier there had died pure game to the
last. It was as a braggart and a bully that he had always thought of him;
now he knew that at least he was not a craven--that he could take blows as
he dealt them, from the shoulder out. He had hated his father, he told
himself unflinchingly, and he did not love him now. Had the dead man opened
his eyes he could have struck him back again with his mother's memory for a
weapon. There had been war between them to the grave, and yet, despite
himself, he knew that he had lost his old boyish shame of the Montjoy
blood. With the instinct of his race to glorify physical courage, he had
seen the shadow of his boyhood loom from the petty