“The parole, officer of the day,” he gasped, curiously waking, yet still in the thrall of slumber.
“Shoulder to shoulder,” came in a shivering whisper from the twilight of the stateroom.
Suddenly impressed with the reality of the experience the old man, agitated, almost speechless, breathless, struggled up on his elbow.
“Why, Captain,” he began, in a piping travesty of his wonted sonorous greeting, “when did you come aboard?”
“Colonel,” said the man standing by the bed, and even the twilight glimmer of the room showed the wild light in his eyes, “you haven’t forgotten the day when ‘Shoulder to Shoulder’ was the parole?”
“Never—! Never!” Colonel Kenwynton clasped his hand on the visitor’s hand. “But for you on that day I should have been these forty odd years in hell.”
“Then follow me. I have something to say. It must be in private—something to disclose. You can trust me, Colonel—Shoulder to Shoulder!”
“Trust you? To the death—Shoulder to Shoulder!” Colonel Kenwynton cried, in a fervor of enthusiasm.
Nevertheless he was chilled while he hastily half dressed and emerged into the dank obscurity of the guards. His hand trembled as he laid it on the stair rail. “An old man,” his lips were involuntarily formulating the words, as he followed his guide, who was descending to the lower deck. “An old man,” and he drew his overcoat about him.
Colonel Kenwynton was born to authority and had had the opportunities of command. But his martial experience had taught him also to obey, and when he had once accepted a mandate he did not hesitate nor even harbor an independent thought. With his soft, broad felt hat drawn far over his brows, down the stairs thumped his groping old feet, doggedly active. The wind was surging amidst the low clouds which were flying before the blast in illimitable phalanxes in some distraught panic of defeat. There must have been a moon lurking beyond their rack and rout, for the weird night landscape was strangely distinct, the forests that restricted the horizon bowed, and bent, and rose again in definite undulations to the successive gusts. One might hardly say how the surface of the far spread of water was discerned, dark, vaguely lustrous, with abysmal suggestions, though with never a glimmer, save where the dim lights of the boat pierced the glooms with a dull ray, here and there, or lay along ripples close at hand with a limited, shoaling glister.