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