He was so a-quiver with excitement and joy and expectation and pride that his mother, pale and tremulous as she made up his little bundle of long-delayed clothes, was a trifle surprised to hear him protest that he could not leave without bidding farewell to the Noakes family, who lived at the Notch in the mountain, and especially his old crony, Delia; yet Captain Bertley’s trumpets would sound “boots and saddles” at the earliest glint of dawn. Delia was near his own age, and he had always magnanimously pitied her for not being a boy. Formerly she had meekly acquiesced in her inferiority, mental and physical, especially in the matter of running, although she made pretty fair speed, and in throwing stones, which she never could be taught to do with accurate aim. But of late years she had not seemed to “sense” this inferiority, so to speak, and once in reference to the war she had declared that she was glad to be a girl, and thus debarred from fighting, “fur killing folks, no matter fur whut or how, always seemed to be sinful!” When argued with on this basis she fell back on the broad and uncontrovertible proposition that “anyhow bloodshed war powerful onpleasant.”
To see these friends once again Hilary had no time to waste. As he made his way along the sandy road with the stars palpitating whitely in the sky above the heavy forest, which rose so high on either hand as to seem almost to touch them, this deep, narrow passage looked when the perspective held a straight line to rising ground, ending in the sidereal coruscations, like the veritable way to the stars, sought by every ambitious wight since the days of the Cæsars. Hilary had never heard an allusion to that royal road, but as he walked along with a buoyant, steady step, his hat in his hand that the breeze might cool his hot brow and blow backward his long masses of fair hair, he followed indeed an upward path in the sentiments that quickened his pulses, for he was resolved upon duty and thinking high thoughts that should materialize in fine deeds. He was to do and dare! He would be useful and faithful and brave—brave! He had a reverence for the quality of courage—not for the sake of its emulous display, but for the spirit of all nobly valiant deeds. He had rejoiced in the very expression of the captain’s eyes—so true and tried! He, too, would meet the coming years fairly. The raw recruit could see his way to the stars at the end of that mountain vista.
But it seemed a poor preparation for all this when he awoke the inmates of the Noakes cabin, for it was past midnight, with the news that he had “jined the cavalry” and was to march at peep of dawn with Bertley’s squadron. It is true that the elders crowded around him half dressed only, so hastily had they been roused, and expressed surprise, congratulations, and regrets in one inconsistent breath, and old Mrs. Dite, Delia’s grandmother, bestowed on him a woolen comforter which she had knitted for him, and for which, improvidently, it being now near summer, he cared less than for the turmoil of excitement and interest they had manifested in his preferment, for he felt every inch a man and a soldier, and they respectfully seemed to defer to his new pretensions. Delia, however, the most unaccountable of girls—and girls are always unaccountable—put her arm over her eyes as she stood beside the mantelpiece, beneath which the embers had been stirred into a blaze for light, and turned her face to the wall and burst into tears. She wept with so much vehemence that her long plait of black hair hanging down her back swayed from side to side of her shoulders as she shook her head to and fro in the extremity of her woe. When the elders remonstrated with her, and declared this was no occasion for sorrow, she only lifted her tear-stained face for a moment to say in justification that she believed that bullets were too small to be dodged with any success when they were flying round promiscuously. And in the midst of the volley of laughter which this evoked from the old people, Hilary’s voice rang out indignantly, “An’ I ain’t no hand ter dodge bullets, nuther.”
“That’s jes’ what I am a-crying about,” replied Delia, to the mischievous delight of the elders.
Thus the farewell to his old friends was not very exhilarating to Hilary. Delia did not even at the last unveil her face or change her attitude against the wall. To shake hands he was obliged to pull her hand from her eyes by way of over her head, and in this maneuver he was moved to notice how much taller he had lately grown. Her hand was very limp and cold and wet with her tears—so wet that he had to wipe these tears from his own hand on the brim of his hat on his homeward way.
And when, as in sudden enchantment, darkness became light and night developed into dawn, when color renewed the landscape, and the dull sky grew red as if flushed with sudden triumph, and the black mountains turned royally purple in the distance and tenderly green nearer at hand, and the waters of the river leaped and flashed like a live thing, as with an actual joy in existence, and the great fiery sun, full of vital yellow flame, flared up over the eastern horizon, the squadron, with jingling spurs and clanking sabers, with carbines and canteens rattling, with the trumpet now and again sending forth those elated, joyous martial strains, so sweet and yet so proud, rode forth into a new day, and Hilary Knox, among the troopers and gallantly mounted, rode forth into a new life.
The bivouac fires glowed for a while, then fell to smoldering and died, leaving but a gray ash to tell of their presence here. Day by day the eagles in the great bare pine tree on the high rock at the summit of the mountain looked for Hilary to visit his point of observation and stir their hearts with fear and wrath. Time and again the male bird might have been seen to circle about at the usual hour for the boy’s coming; first with apprehension lest his absence was too good to be true, then, with the courage of immunity undisciplined by fear, screaming and flouncing as if to challenge this apparition of quondam terror. Now and then the pair seemed to argue and collogue together upon the mystery of his non-appearance, and to chuffily compare notes, and seek to classify their impressions of this singular specimen of the animal kingdom. Perhaps, tabulated, their conclusions might stand thus: Genus, boy; habits, noisy; diet, omnivorous; element, mischief; uses, undiscovered and undiscoverable.
Long, long after the eagles had forgotten the intruder, after their brood, the two ill-feathered nestlings, had taken strongly to wing, after their nest, a mass of loose, but well collocated sticks and grass, had given way to the beat of the rain and the blasts of the wind, did Hilary’s mother wearily gaze from the heights where the mountain cabin was perched down upon the curves of the valley road along which she had seen him riding away with that glittering train, and sigh and let her knitting fall from her nerveless hands, and wonder what would the manner of his home-coming be, or whether the future held at all a home-coming for him.
And her many sighs kept her heart sick and turned her hair very white.