But Buck Powers breaks in on them at this moment, and mutters: "Cap, Kruger's here! He's talkin' with the men over there!"
"On which side of the cars? Can he see me if I leave them this way?"
"No!"
"You're going?" says the girl. And putting her arms round his neck, nestles to him, and murmurs: "Remember, your life is my life!"
And so he leaves her, and steps cautiously out, and crouching in shadow of the cars, and looking over the white plateaus of drifted snow, he thinks:
"Fly, where? Fight—how? Impossible!" Then of a sudden the snow disappears, and he remembers a hot spring day in '64, in Arkansas, when he and his Iowa boys did what was deemed impossible in war—artillery holding woodland and brush copse against infantry. He sees his cannoneers—boys with fresh young faces and fair hair, just from Western prairies and green fields—fall and die, as the musketry flashes all about them, and singing bullets bring death to them, but still stand and scourge that undergrowth and timber shelter with grape and case shot, till the gray infantry slowly draws back; until the Yankee lumberman has built up a dam like those that float timber down Maine rivers, and so saved the Federal fleet, and thus saved the Federal army.
He mutters: "I did the impossible then for my country; I can do the impossible now for my love."
And from that moment Harry Lawrence has the one great quality that makes success possible in all desperate undertakings—confidence!