muscular action entirely, and that he was virtually dead. I lifted
him and gave him some water, but it would not pass through his fixed
teeth. In the pocket of his blouse was a New Testament with the name
Fielder Dawson, Mo., scribbled in it in pencil. While I was writing
it down for identification, a boy as young as himself came from
behind me down the trail.

"It is no use," he said; "the surgeon has seen him; he says he is
just the same as dead. He is my bunkie; we only met two weeks ago at
San Antonio; but he and me had got to be such good friends--But
there's nothing I can do now." He threw himself down on the rock
beside his bunkie, who was still breathing with that hoarse inhuman
rattle, and I left them, the one who had been spared looking down
helplessly with the tears creeping across his cheeks.

The firing was quite close now, and the trail was no longer filled
with blanket rolls and haversacks, nor did pitiful, prostrate figures
lie in wait behind each rock. I guessed this must mean that I now
was well in advance of the farthest point to which Capron's troop had
moved, and I was running forward feeling confident that I must be
close on our men, when I saw the body of a sergeant blocking the
trail and stretched at full length across it. Its position was a
hundred yards in advance of that of any of the others--it was
apparently the body of the first man killed. After death the bodies
of some men seem to shrink almost instantly within themselves; they
become limp and shapeless, and their uniforms hang upon them
strangely. But this man, who was a giant in life, remained a giant
in death--his very attitude was one of attack; his fists were
clinched, his jaw set, and his eyes, which were still human, seemed
fixed with resolve. He was dead, but he was not defeated. And so