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“Sholto, me lad, it’s me heart is sore for you this day. Yer coort-martial will be read out to-morrow morning! Aye, and – and” – his voice sank into a whisper – “the farrier-major has got the ordhers for to rig the thriangles. It’s to be flogged ye are, my poor fellow!”
Sholto sent his chum away abruptly; he could not talk, he could hardly think; all he could do was to wish himself dead and spared this unutterable shame. Death came not, but instead the morning; and with the morning came Mick with a copious dose of brandy, which he entreated his comrade to drink, for it would “stun the pain.” “Every fellow,” he argued, “primed himself so before a flogging, and why shouldn’t he?”
But Sholto refused to fortify himself with Dutch courage; and then poor Mick produced his last evidence of affection in the shape of a leaden bullet which he had beaten flat, and which held tight between the teeth, he knew from personal experience, was a great help in enabling a fellow to resist “hollerin’ out.”
Presently the escort fell in and marched the prisoner to the riding-school. Sholto found there two troops of the regiment drawn up, in front of them a knot of officers, among whom he noticed Mr. Kidson, and in front of them again the colonel, with the court-martial documents in his hand. The lad’s eye took in the doctor, the farriers – each with his cat – and the triangle rigged against the wall under the gallery. The sergeant of the escort ordered him to take two paces to the front, remove his cap, and stand at attention. And so he stood, outwardly calm, waiting for his sentence.
“Proceedings of a district court-martial” – the colonel began, reading in a loud voice from the scroll in his hand. To Sholto the document seemed interminable. At last the end came. “The Court, having considered the evidence brought before it, finds the prisoner, No. 420, Corporal Sholto Mackenzie, G troop, Thirtieth Light Dragoons, guilty of the said charge of theft, and does hereby sentence the said prisoner to be reduced to the rank and pay of a private dragoon” – here the colonel paused for a moment and then added – “and further to undergo the punishment of fifty lashes.”
The regimental sergeant-major strode up to Sholto, with a penknife ripped the gold lace corporal stripes from the arm of his jacket, and threw them down on the tan. Then the colonel’s stern cold voice uttered the word “Strip.” There was a little momentary bustle, and then Sholto was half hanging, half standing, lashed by the wrists and ankles to the triangles, while the farrier-major stood measuring his distance, fingering the whip-cords of his “cat,” and waiting for the word “Begin”!
Suddenly a wild shriek pealed through the great building from the gallery above the head of the man fastened up there to be flogged.
“Arrah musha, colonel dear!” followed in shrill accents – “for the love of the Holy Jasus and the blissed Vargin, hould yer hand, and spare an innocent man! I tell ye he’s as innocent as the babe unborn, and it’s mesilf, Bridget Malony, an honest married woman on the strength, that can pruve that same! Ochone, colonel dear, listen to me, won’t yez?”
All eyes were concentrated on the little gallery. It was a sort of gazebo, built out from the wall at the height of about ten feet, and the only access to it was from outside. Bending eagerly over the rail, attired in nothing but a petticoat and a chemise, her hair streaming wildly over her shoulders, and with a round bare place like a tonsure on the crown of her head, which gave her a most extraordinary appearance, was visible Mrs. Malony. She had been struck down by a sunstroke the day Sholto was put under arrest, and had been in hospital ever since.
The general opinion was that the good woman was crazy: but Mrs. Malony knew her own mind – she had something to say, and she was determined to say it. She had just finished her wild appeal to the colonel, when she cast a hurried glance over her shoulder, and then, indifferently clad as she was, nimbly climbed over the rail, and dropped upon the tan. At that moment a couple of nurses rushed into the balcony, but they were too late. Mrs. Malony had got the “flure”; straight up to the colonel she ran on her bare feet, and broke out again into vehement speech.
“I swear to yer honner the corporal is as innocent as my little Terence, what should be at his mother’s breasht this moment. He is, so help me God! There is the rapscallion uv a conspirator,” she yelled, pointing a long, bare, skinny arm at Mr. Kidson; “there is his white-livered tool!” – and up went the other arm like a danger-signal pointing to the sergeant-major. “Hear me shpake, sor,” cried the woman, “and sure am I ye’ll belave me!”
“Nonsense,” said the chief, “you are mad or drunk, woman! Here, take her away!” and he beckoned to the nurses.
But the major, a Scotsman, intervened.
“At least hear her story,” he argued; “there must be some reason in all this fervour of hers. I know the woman; she is no liar.”
“Well, what have you to say, Mrs. Malony?” said the colonel.
“One moment, sir!” interposed the major, and there passed a few words in an undertone between him and the colonel – then the latter spoke aloud.
“Mr. James,” said he, addressing the adjutant, “take Mr. Kidson outside and remain there with him, and you, Sergeant-Major Norris, take charge of Sergeant-Major Hope. Mr. James, you will see that the two are kept apart.”
And then Mrs. Malony gained her point and was allowed to tell her story. She had been “doing for” Mr. Kidson, she said, ever since he joined. The day before Sholto was put under arrest, when she was in the lumber-room of Mr. Kidson’s bungalow, she overheard the plot concocted between him and the sergeant-major. Early next morning, when the regiment was out at “watering order,” she had watched Sergeant-Major Hope go to Corporal Mackenzie’s cot, pick the lock of his trunk, take out his holdall, and therein place Mr. Kidson’s watch and chain. An hour later, when she was on her way to the bungalow of the “praste” to ask “his riverence’s” advice as to what she should do, she received a sunstroke, and was insensible for several days. When she recovered consciousness she had forgotten everything that happened for a day or more before her accident until that morning, when she happened to hear the attendants gossiping amongst themselves that Corporal Mackenzie was to be flogged that day for stealing Mr. Kidson’s watch and chain. Then everything flashed vividly back into her memory, and she had made her escape from the hospital and reached the scene just in time.
Mrs. Malony spoke with amazing volubility, and the telling of her story did not occupy more time than a few minutes. When she was done, and stood silent, panting and weeping, the colonel turned to the sergeant of the guard and ordered the prisoner to be unfastened and marched back to the guard-room. While Mrs. Malony had been speaking, nobody had noticed Sholto, and when they went to cut him loose, they found that he had fainted. The parade was dismissed; and the colonel, the major, and the adjutant adjourned to the orderly room. Mr. Kidson was ordered to be brought in. He met Mrs. Malony’s accusation with a flat and contemptuous denial, desiring with some insolence in his tone to know whether the colonel could think it proper to take the word of a crazy Irish barrack-room slut before that of an officer and a gentleman. “That depends on circumstances, and whether I happen to accept your definitions,” was the colonel’s dry comment, as he formally put Mr. Kidson under arrest, and having ordered him to his quarters, called for the sergeant-major to be brought in. This man was a poor faint-hearted rascal. He was ghastly pale, and his knees trembled as he flinched under the colonel’s searching eye. On cross-examination he broke down altogether, and at length, with many protestations of remorse, confessed the whole truth, and that Mr. Kidson had bribed him to co-operate in the scheme to ruin Corporal Mackenzie. This wretched accomplice was in his turn sent away into close arrest, and Mr. Kidson was re-summoned into the orderly room and informed that his sergeant-major had confessed everything.
The two field-officers were fain to avert from the regiment the horrible scandal, even at the cost of some frustration of justice. The option was given to Kidson of standing a court-martial, or of sending in the resignation of his commission within an hour and quitting the station before the day was out. Then and there the shameless blackguard wrote out the document, made an insolent sweeping salaam all round, mounted his tat, and rode off to his bungalow. As he was crossing the parade-ground he encountered Sholto Mackenzie, who had just been released by the colonel’s orders, leaving the guard-room a free man and surrounded by a knot of troop-mates, conspicuous among whom was Mick Sullivan, half mad with delight. As Kidson passed the group with a baleful scowl, the trammels of discipline snapped for once, and a burst of groans and hooting made him quicken his pace, lest worse things should befall. In two hours more the disgraced man was clear of the cantonment.
In the previous article it has been told how in the early days of the great mutiny Mick Sullivan and his comrade were transmogrified from cavalrymen into members of that gallant regiment the Ross-shire Buffs – the old 78th Highlanders – and did good service in the “little fighting column” at the head of which Havelock fought his way up country from Allahabad to Cawnpore. It was on the afternoon of Havelock’s first fight, the sharp action of Futtehpore, that Sholto Mackenzie and Mick Sullivan were lying down in the shade of a tree waiting for the baggage to come up. Futtehpore town had been carried by a rush, and there had been some hand-to-hand fighting in the streets – for the mutinied Sepoys dodged about among the houses and had to be driven out. There was a delay in following up the fugitives; for a waggon-load of rupees had been upset in the principal street and the temptation of the silver caused the soldiers to dally, while others straggled in search of food and drink. Meanwhile the mutineer cavalry rallied beyond the town. Palliser’s Irregulars were sent forward to disperse the formation, followed by such men of our infantry as could hastily be mustered. Among those who went forward was Sholto Mackenzie. Palliser’s native troopers were half-hearted and hung back when their chief charged the Sepoy horse, with the result that Palliser was dashed from his horse, and would have been cut to pieces but for the devotion of his ressaldar, who lost his own life in saving that of his leader.
“Did you notice,” said Sholto to his comrade as they rested, “the squadron leader of the Pandy Cavalry that handled Palliser’s fellows so roughly out yonder?”
“Bedad, an’ I did not!” replied Sullivan. “Every divil av thim was uglier than the other, an’ it’s their own mothers should be ashamed to own the biling av thim!”
“Look here, Mick,” said Sholto, “I’ll take my oath I saw that dog Kidson to-day, in command of the Pandy Squadron!”
“Kidson!” ejaculated Sullivan in the wildest astonishment. “It’s dhramin’ ye are! Sure Kidson must be either prowlin’ somewhere in Madras, or else on his road home to England!”
“I tell you I am as sure I saw him to-day as I am that I see you now. It was he who dismounted Palliser and cut down the ressaldar. I am convinced it was he and none other!”
“Well, if you’re so sure as that, it’s no use to conthradick ye. Plase the saints, ye may get a close chance at him soon, and then – Lord pity him!”
Mick’s aspiration was fulfilled. The “close chance” came to Sholto a few days later, in the heart of the battle of Cawnpore. The Highlanders had rolled up the Sepoy flank by a bayonet charge, had shattered their centre, and captured the village on which it rested. The mutineer infantry of the left and centre were in full rout, their retreat covered by a strong body of native cavalry which showed a very determined front.
Sholto and his comrade were close together in the ranks of the Ross-shire Buffs, when the former suddenly grasped the latter’s arm, and in a low earnest voice asked —
“Mick, do you see that officer in charge of the covering squadron of the Pandies?”
Sullivan gazed long and intently, and then burst out —
“By the holy poker, it’s that treacherous blackguard Kidson!”
“Right, Mick, and I must get at him somehow!”
“Wid all my heart, chum, but it’s aisier said than done, just now, at any rate. You must mark time, and trust to luck!”
Just then Barrow came galloping up at the head of his handful of horsemen, and besought the chief to let him go at the mutineer sowars. But Havelock shook his head, for Barrow’s strength all told was but eighteen sabres. But a little later Beatson, the Adjutant-General, who, stricken with cholera and unable to sit his horse, had come up to the front on a gun-carriage, saw an opportunity after the General had ridden away, and took it on himself to give Barrow leave to attack. The flank of the grenadier company of the Highlanders, where Sholto stood, was close to Beatson’s gun-carriage, in rear of which his horse was led, and a sudden thought struck the young fellow. Stepping forward with carried rifle, he told Captain Beatson that he was a cavalry soldier, and noticing the led horse, begged eagerly to be allowed to mount it and join the charge for which the volunteer cavalry were preparing.
“Up with you, my man!” said poor dying Beatson. “Here, you shall have my sword, and I don’t want it back clean, remember!”
Sholto was in the saddle with a spring, and made the nineteenth man under Barrow’s command; a mixed lot, but full of pluck to a man. As he formed up on the flank, there reached his ears honest Mick’s cheery advice —
“Now, Sholto, me dear lad, keep yer sword-hand up and yer bridle-hand down, an’ remimber ye reprisint the honour an’ glory of the ould 30th Light!”
Barrow threw away his cigar, gathered up his reins, and with a shout of “Charge!” that might have given the word of command to a brigade, rammed his spurs into his horse’s flank and went off at score, his little band close on his heels. Hard on the captain’s flank galloped Sholto Mackenzie, a red spot on each cheek, his teeth hard set, his blazing eyes never swerving from the face of one man of that seething mass on which they were riding. “Give ’em the point, lads!” roared Barrow, as he skewered a havildar and then drove right in among them. The white-faced man with the black moustache, who was Sholto’s mark, rather shirked out of the mêlée when he saw it was to be close quarters; but Mackenzie, looking neither to the right nor to the left, with his bridle-hand well down, and Beatson’s sword in full play, drove his way at length within weapon’s length of the other.
“Now, liar and perjurer!” he hissed from between his teeth, “if you are not coward as well, stand up to me and let us fight it out!”
Kidson’s answer was a lurid scowl and a pistol bullet, which just grazed Sholto’s temple. Lifting his horse with his bridle-hand, and striking its flanks with his spurless heels, the latter sent his sword-point straight at Kidson’s throat. The thrust would have gone through and out at the further side, but that the sword-point struck some concealed protection and was shivered up to the hilt. The renegade Briton smiled a baleful smile as he brought his weapon from guard to point, as if the other was at his mercy. But this was not so; with a shout Sholto tightened the curb-rein till his horse reared straight on end, striking it as it rose with the shattered sword hilt. The maddened animal plunged forward, receiving in his chest the point of Kidson’s sword; and Sholto on the instant bending forward fastened a deadly grip on the other’s throat. The impetus hurled both of them to the ground, and now, down among the horses’ feet, the close-locked strife swaying and churning above them, their struggle unto the death was wrought out. Kidson struggled like a madman; he bit, he kicked, he fought with an almost superhuman fury; but the resolute grip of the avenger never slackened on his throat. Sholto held on with his right hand, groping about with his left for some weapon wherewith to end the contest. At length his grasp closed on the hilt of a dropped sword; – and a moment later it was all over with the man whom the survivors of Havelock’s Ironsides speak of with scorn and disgust to this day by the name of “Nana Sahib’s Englishman.”
THE OLD SERGEANT
The scene of my little story is a sequestered hill-parish away up among the brown moors and sullen pinewoods of northern Scotland, and the date of it is full forty years ago, when I was a boy living in the grey old manse down in the sheltered glen which was the only picturesque “bit” of all the parish whose minister my father was. It was a curiously primitive region. Its crofters and farmers lived out their lives and were laid in the old graveyard up on the hillock – hardly a soul of them having ever been twenty miles outside the parish bounds. There was a vague lingering tradition concerning a scapegrace son, long since dead and gone, of old Sandy McCulloch of the Calternach – how the daring young ne’er-do-well had actually left his native land, made his way to India – we boys used to look up the map of India in the manse atlas – had married a “begum” there, and had finally been poisoned off by that mysterious female. This tradition had engendered a fine wholesome terror of begums, and all kinds of adventures that haply might involve matrimonial connections therewith, with disastrous results to follow. So our young men stayed at home and tilled the sour cold land laboriously but contentedly. There were a few exceptions, it is true. Now and then a young fellow would take the Queen’s shilling, and go out from among us on a career of soldiering. They seldom came back, for Cardwell’s name had not yet been heard in the land, and short service in the army was a reform undreamed of. When a man ’listed then, it was nominally for life; actually, until his bodily vigour was so impaired that he was held no longer fit for service, and then he got a pension for the remainder of his days. But what with hard service abroad, what with cholera in Hindustan and Yellow Jack in the West Indies, what with poor fare in barracks and on noxious crowded transports, no great proportion of the soldiers of those days managed to keep alive long enough to attain the pensioned period. There was but one army-pensioner in our parish, and he is “the old sergeant” of my story.
They were grand old specimens, those veterans of a bypast era. To them the credit of their old regiment and the honour of the service were dearer than anything else in all the world. They had a great self-respect that had been instilled by the discipline they had undergone, and by the dangers they had passed through. They had a single-hearted loyalty to the Crown they had served, and a manly belief in the country which their strong arms and ready weapons had helped to save. It is no doubt all right in a military sense that there are no old soldiers among us now; but of this I am sure, that in a good many respects the country is the worse for the want of them.
There was a Sunday morning of my boyhood which I remember as if it were yesterday. The Sunday school, held in the grey old schoolroom on the edge of the wood in the centre of which stood the parish kirk, had just been dismissed. The bell had not yet begun to ring, but it was the custom of the great straggling parish to hold its grand weekly palaver, summer and winter alike, on the little wood-encircled open space around the kirk, during the half-hour before the simple Presbyterian service began. To this end, the folk who were to constitute the congregation were gathering, coming in by twos and threes along the various paths centring on the kirk. Good old Willie Duffus, the elder from the far-distant Forgie district, had climbed and descended the bleak shoulder of Muldearie, had picked his devious way across the moss, had forded the burn, and was now so close at hand that I could discern the weather-beaten fluffiness of his ancestral beaver, and the resplendent brass buttons on the mediæval blue coat which had not been new when it had been his grandfather’s wedding-garment. Johnny Mills, the cripple tailor, who was wont to carry his goose and ironing-board from farmhouse to farmhouse, and to accept his food as part of his poor pay, came shambling up the dykeside from his hovel in the kailyard under the old willow-tree. With an air of rustic patronage which he could well afford, since most of the poor folk were in his books, Sandy Riach, the “merchant” of the Kirktoun, came strutting up the path from the little wooded hamlet. The farm lads, with their straw-coloured or red hair cut square in the nape of the neck, brilliant as to chest in their scarlet or blue plush vests studded with big white bone buttons, clumped kirkward in their heavy hobnailed boots, exchanging now and then a word of clumsy badinage with the lasses in their tartan shawls, and the rig-and-fur stockings and stout shoes they had put on after wading the burn down in the hollow. Old Maggie Dey, as she wended her slow way leaning on her stick, would stop now and again for a confidential whisper with a good-wife; for Maggie was the parish “howdie” —Anglice, midwife – and had officiated at the introduction into this vale of tears of more than half of the population of the parish. Just on the rise of the “manse-brae” I could discern my mother’s bonnet as she climbed the steep knoll, with a little cohort of my younger brothers and sisters by her side, walking orderly, as beseemed the day and the occasion.
Ha! there was old Robbie Strachan nailing up a notice on the half-open church door, and now he was unfastening the bell-rope from its hook high up on the porch wall, preparatory to the statutory twenty minutes’ tolling of the clangorous old bell up there on the stumpy belfry. We boys, keenly alert, were watching Robbie’s every motion, rejoicing in the prospect of one of our chiefest weekly joys; for Robbie when he was in a good humour would let us have the rope and do the ringing, all save the peremptory final peals known as the “ringing in,” while he conversed sedately with a knot of his cronies.
Robbie Strachan, the bellman and “kirk officer” of our parish, was a tall, gaunt old fellow, lean-faced and high-featured, straight still as a pine, although in his time he had put in forty years of hard soldiering. His regulation mutton-chop whiskers, white as snow, just reached the corners of his grim old mouth, the rest of his lined visage closely shaven. You would have known him at a glance for an old soldier, by his balanced step, his square shoulders, and his disciplined attitudes; he stood proclaimed yet more plainly by the well-brushed threadbare trews of Gordon tartan that encased his lean and wiry nether limbs. Robbie had been a sergeant in the local regiment, the gallant Ninety-Second, and in its ranks had borne the brunt of many a stubborn fray. He had worn the brogues from off his feet in Moore’s disastrous retreat on Corunna, and had helped to bury that noble chief “by the struggling moonbeam’s misty ray and the lantern dimly burning.” He had been in the thick of the fierce bayonet struggle in the steep street of Fuentes de Oñoro, had climbed the ridge to the desperate fight of Albuera, and had taken a hand in carrying the bridge of Almarez. A wound had kept him from Salamanca, but he was in Graham’s front line on the day of Vittoria, and had many a tale of the rich plunder that fell to the conquerors in that short, sharp, and decisive combat. He had heard the bullets patter on the rocks of Roncesvalles, had waded the “bloody Bidassoa” under the shadow of the lofty Rhune, and was only hindered from being in at the death in the final desperate struggle on the glacis of Toulouse, by having got a bullet in the chest as he waded up to the knees behind Picton through the marsh which Soult vainly imagined protected his front at Orthez.
Robbie was but a corporal when he went down at Orthez, but he was full sergeant on that wet June morning of the following year when “Cameron’s pibroch woke the slumbering host” to range itself in “battle’s magnificently stern array!” Bullets had an unpleasant habit of finding their billets in him, and he was knocked over again on the forenoon of Waterloo when hanging on to the stirrup-leather of a Scots Grey in the memorable charge of the “Union Brigade” and shouting “Scotland for ever!” in unison with the comrades of horse and foot hailing from the land of cakes. The army surgeons in their cheery manner pronounced him as full of holes as a cullender, and were for invaliding him then and there as unfit for further service; but Robbie stoutly pleaded that he would be as good a man as ever when his wounds were healed, and triumphantly made good his words. So he had put in fifteen years’ subsequent soldiering, and had heard the British drum-beat all round the world, ere, some ten years before the date of my story, he had been retired with a sergeant’s pension for life and something additional for wounds. He was an old man now, but he carried his years well, and was still a good man in the harvest field, or with the spade. Most of his work with that implement was done in the manse garden, and we manse boys used to spend hours in listening to his stories of his old fighting days, while he made the drills for the garden peas, or dibbled in the kail plants in the plot behind the gooseberry bushes.
An exemplary man in a general way, Sergeant Robbie had his little failings; but for which he would have been an elder of the parish instead of being but the bellman and kirk officer. He was rather quick-tempered, and when moved to wrath, he swore in a manner which conclusively proved he had been with the army in Flanders. Then again, occasionally, on pension days mostly, he would take more whisky than was good for him. When he got “fou,” it was always in the light of day, and so he exposed himself. As he marched home from the little public-house down at Blackhillock, with “the malt abune the meal,” his effort to appear preternaturally sober was quite a spectacle. Always stiff of attitude, he was then positively rigid: he would sway, but it was the swaying of a ramrod; when haply he fell into the ditch, there was no collapsing in a limp heap – he went down all of a length, as if there was not a joint in all his long body. But these exhibitions were comparatively infrequent, and were excused in the eyes of the parish censors because of the hole in the sergeant’s head made by the Waterloo bullet.
He and his old wife, who had seen a great deal of the world from the top of a baggage-waggon, but who was a most worthy domestic soul, lived together in a cottage at the back of the wood. The couple had an only son. When the youth grew into a strapping lad, Robbie had marched him down to Gordon Castle, to take counsel concerning his boy’s future, with his patron the Duke. It was in Robbie’s strong arms that the Duke – then Lord March – had lain, when the surgeons probed unsuccessfully for the bullet that pierced his chest on the day of Orthez, and which His Grace carried in him to the grave. As the result of this conference, Robbie had taken his son into Aberdeen, and enlisted him in his own old corps, the Gordon Highlanders. I remember the young fellow coming home on furlough, and the sensation among the simple folk as he swaggered up to the kirk in his flowing tartans and with the ostrich-feather bonnet on his handsome head. Old Robbie was a proud man that day, for his son had the corporal’s stripe already on his arm, although he had been barely three years a soldier.
If I have been over-minute in the attempt to depict Sergeant Robbie, I advance the double excuse, that he was among the prominent figures of my youth time, and that the type is now as extinct as the dodo. The old man stepped out from under the kirk wall with the bell-rope in his hand, and we boys darted forward to make our request that he would hand it over to us and let us do the ringing for him. But there was a strange stern expression in his face that gave us pause. “No the day, laddies,” was all he said, as he took post at the corner of the stone dyke, and began to sway the chafed old rope. We stood silently by, in wonder at his mood. We had known him cross; but he was not cross now: in the gloomy set face and the unwonted silence there was something quite new and strange to us. And yet another strange thing, his wonted cronies held away from him this morning. There was something mysterious in the air. The people, as they gathered in the open space outside the kirk, formed little muttering knots. From these, every now and then, a person would drop out, and strolling up to the kirk door in a seemingly purposeless way, would stand there a while looking up at the notices displayed on it, and then saunter back to the group he had left, or drift into another. It was curious that, no matter wherever you looked, every one seemed to be stealing furtive glances at Sergeant Robbie, standing out there by himself swaying the bell-rope with his long lean arms. And furtive as they were, the old man was clearly conscious of those glances. His face grew harder, grimmer, and more set; yet once or twice gazing up at him in my bewilderment with a boy’s curiosity, I thought I noticed a quivering of the muscles about the close-gripped lips.
The “ringing in” was finished, and the congregation had passed into the kirk. As Sergeant Robbie, carrying the big pulpit Bible, strode up the aisle in front of the minister, it seemed to me that I had never seen him carrying so high that old white head of his, with the cicatrix of the Waterloo bullet in the gnarled forehead. Every eye was on the old fellow, and he knew it, and bore himself with a quiet courage in which somehow there came to be felt an element of pathos. It was curious again how all eyes centred upon him when in his extempore prayer the minister besought “consolation for those who were in sore trouble and mourning over the falling away of one near and dear to them.” Robbie stood straight and square, his face fixed – only his lean brown throat swelled for a moment as if he were resolutely forcing down a spasm of emotion. Tibbie his wife stood by his side, and when the old soldier laid his hand on her shoulder she quelled with a strong effort her rising sobs.
