I hid my surprise from the man, and told him I had heard that, of course, but that the bar regarded his absence as merely temporary.
That summer I got into the habit of scanning the lists of sick and disabled soldiers who were at Chickamauga and the other fever camps, or in Cuba. I was especially likely to do this where the First Regiment was concerned. It was a practice foolish in a way, because it took up time in the morning, and was only a meaningless list of names, anyway. But then, we were rather proud of the First in the city that summer, for it was our crack regiment, you know, and my wife had one or two acquaintances among the young officers, who reflected a certain glory upon her, and gave a color to her conversation.
A friend of mine at the capital, a lawyer, often sent me, two or three times a week, perhaps, copies of the local papers, and these frequently published little bits of personal gossip about boys from that town who had gone to “the front,” as they put it. The country papers gave a more personal tone to their war articles than did the city papers. These latter seemed to think that a war is got up especially for the officers. Doubtless they were about right.
After a while, the First went to Cuba. The regiment got there too late for active fighting in the operations about Santiago, but not too late for duty in the trenches, with their freshly upturned earth, damp and saturated with malaria. Nor did they get there too late for the fever. Many of them contracted it, and some died of it. I used to read the lists of the sick and dead, to see if the names of any of my wife’s acquaintances in the field, line or staff, were among them.
Once in a while I would observe that some young soldier had died of something or other and homesickness. One morning I happened upon a name that impressed me as being familiar. After studying it a while, I finally recognized it as the same name that had been upon the law license that was framed in oak and hanging above the desk of the office boy. There was printed after the name:
“Pernicious malaria and nostalgia.”
In the spring of the following year (1899) the bodies of several hundred soldiers who had died in Cuba were brought home for final interment. I happened to be in the capital again and heard that there was to be a military funeral that afternoon. I had some curiosity to see a military funeral, and so, having nothing else to do, went to the church where it was to be held. You can imagine my surprise when I was told that it was the funeral of the boy who had once tended the cigar stand in the lobby of the St. James and read Reeves’ History of the English Law, the boy who had afterward gone to the city to practise law, and, later, enlisted in the First Infantry to die in Cuba. There were not many at the funeral, for, of course, he was only a private. There was a woman there in black, probably his aunt, or mother, for she appeared to weep, and some girl. Out at the cemetery—Oak Wood, where a general is buried—there were few persons besides the clergyman, and the woman and the girl. A local militia company had sent a firing squad, and it fired the salute prescribed for a private over the grave, and a bugler stood at the head and blew taps, the soldier’s good night. Happening to have a rose or two with me, I threw them into the grave. The coffin, of course, had a flag over it, but that was about all there was of the military funeral—hardly enough, indeed, to reward one’s curiosity.
This, I believe, is all. The story hardly seems worth the telling, now that it is written, but I fancied that I detected one or two coincidences in my haphazard relations with the boy, like my reading of his death in the paper, and my happening to be in the capital on the day of his funeral, and so I set them down.
I forgot to say that I happened to have his law license with me that day at the funeral. After he had enlisted in the First, perhaps I should explain, I noticed it one day in the offices of Goodman, Peck, Gilmore and Eckhart, where it was evidently in the way. So I let it hang in my office all that summer and all the next winter, but in the spring we needed the wall space for some new bookcases, and I took it down. I think the girl who was at the funeral that day, whoever she is, has it now.
THE END