“I’ve tried to make it plain,” said Dad patiently.
The captain made as though to speak; then turned his head abruptly away. When he faced Dad again, the look of physical pain in the sleepy eyes was all but effaced by one of utter shame.
“It is only fair to tell you, suh,” he began jerkily, his glance downcast, like a scolded schoolboy, “it’s only fair to tell you that I had every intention, a while back, of taking you and your orderly prisoner and turning you over to our provost marshal to be shipped off to prison.”
“Well,” responded Dad, “suppose you had? That is your affair. Every man to his own whim. Perhaps when you get to my age, friend, you’ll think twice before sticking a harmless old codger and a little boy into the living death of a war prison. Or perhaps you won’t. It is your own affair, as I told you. And now let me finish with those hurts of yours. I must be on my way.”
Briskly, if a whit stiffly, he went on with his “first aid” work. The Confederate, as in a trance, sat still, and let his conqueror work over him. He seemed for the time bereft of the power of speech.
Emp, ordered back by his master and scolded by Dad for interfering, had sat gravely on the hillock top, and with cocked head and critical eye had surveyed the combat below. Still brooding over Jimmie’s defection and the cruel order not to follow, the dog remained on the hilltop and, the fight being over, fell to studying the world at large in the hope of seeing his master return, penitent at his act of desertion, and make friends with him again.
But Jimmie did not come back. Once Emp thought the boy was drawing near, for his keen-pricked ears caught the sound of approaching horse-hoofs.
A second of listening, however, told him that these hoofs were walking; not galloping. Also, that there were several horses approaching in single file and from a direction opposite to that in which Jimmie had vanished.
The hoof-beats drew nearer. Emp’s watchdog instincts—one of his multi-breed ancestors having perhaps been guardian of a farmstead—stirred within him. War experience had taught him that where there were horses there were likely to be men.
Indeed, his twitching, moist nostrils had already caught the scent of men—several men—strange men, approaching.