He saw again in memory two figures before a cabin hearth, debating with the heat of devotees, the calibre and qualities of today's and yesterday's military leaders in general, of Hector Dinwiddie in particular. He saw himself again sitting huddled in the chimney corner, nursing the patched knees of an illiterate boy.
Now one was dead—he could not even be sure that both were not dead—and Boone, no longer in homespun, had come from Washington to uncover his head under the winter sky as the words of the last rites were spoken over the body of General Prince.
Into that grave, it seemed to him, was going something unreplaceable. This man was the embodiment of a passing tradition, almost of a dead era, in the altering life of the nation itself.
The ideas and beliefs for which his early life had stood were already buried, and now he lay himself at rest, a link between present and past—as much an exemplification of chivalry as though his feet had been crossed and his sword laid in the crusader's posture of repose.
Boone heard the austere beauty of the service—but he felt more poignantly the picture that his eyes looked on: the coffin draped with two flags that overlapped their folds—though once a tide of cannon-smother ran between them—the Stars and Stripes of the Nation and the Stars and Bars of the Confederacy.
On one hand, in a grizzled honour-guard, stood old men in the same mist grey that he had worn with a general's stars until Lee surrendered, and on the other hand was ranged an equally frosted and withered squad in Grand Army blue. Then at last a clear and flawless sweetness floated away from the lips of the militia bugler, who, in accordance with the General's wish, was sounding taps across his closing grave.
Something rose in Boone Wellver's throat, and a strange idea stole, not facetiously but with reverent sincerity, into his thoughts. He wished it might have been possible for him to stand there as the clods fell, not as he stood now in the dress of a gentleman, but in homespun and butternut, clasping in his tight hands the coon-skin cap that his boyhood had known. For in this gathering, that was like a quiet pageant of passing eras, he stood for an elder thing than any other here. He was, in effect, by birth and by beginning, the ancestor of them all, for he had been born a pioneer!
The school, which had become a home to Happy Spradling, had grown marvellously since that day when the old mountaineer wrote with his donation of rocky acres: "I have heart and cravin' that our young people may grow better, and I deed my land to a school as long as the Constitution of the United States stands."
It was a precarious undertaking with no endowment except its spirit, but it is not recorded that Elijah went hungry when his commissary was in the keeping of ravens—for back of the ravens was the Promise.