With a drawn brow he thought what eventful years those five had been, and, looking up at the unchanging hills, laughed aloud.
The North and South poles had been discovered. Portugal and China had set up republics on the ashes of monarchy and empire. Diaz, the old feudist lord of Mexico, had relinquished his powers and dropped out. The Italian had fought the Ottoman; Europe's cry of "Wolf! wolf!" in the Balkans had ceased to be an empty alarm and, burning fiercely up and burning out, had broken again into secondary blazing. Our own armies were on Mexican soil. In which of these abstract and epochal affairs had his friend played a part?
Boone felt, in his heart, a newly comprehended ache for the pathos of the veteran's life. He could realize, as he had not before realized, the unsatisfied hungers that must have been always with that solitary exile—a hunger appeased in part only when under some name not his own he heard again the call of the bugles and followed the flight of the war-eagles.
Manifestly, for all their closeness of thought and companionship, he had only seen a part of the man McCalloway. There must be facets in the stone even finer than those he knew, which had never been revealed to him. He had seen—often—the warmth of affection like the softened glow of a diamond lying on a jeweller's velvet, and—on occasion—the keen, cold brightness of unyielding strength, but there must have been, too, white spurts of blaze almost dazzling in their fierce lustre which it had taken the battlefield to bring out.
And these he did not know.
He had just been reading a paper with which the gentleman had beguiled many a lonely winter night and which he had left unfinished. It was a critical analysis of Hector Dinwiddie's career and military thought, undertaken at the request of Basil Prince.
Prince himself had been a historian, and yet Boone doubted whether he could in style or vigour of thought have bettered this casual writing. As Boone read it, the portrait of a great soldier stood before his eyes. He had never guessed until then how great a soldier had been cut off by Dinwiddie's suicide. Now he could perceive why other governments, governments which might some day meet Britain in the field, had drawn sighs of relief at his death. So in a greater degree the world had breathed easier when Bonaparte went to St. Helena.
Yet of Dinwiddie, McCalloway had not written flatteries. Rather his portraiture was strong because his brush stroke was so strict and severe that often it became adverse criticism.
Boone leaned back and drew from his pocket the key that would unlock an answer to his questionings. He thrust it into the keyhole and then, as a spasm of pain crossed his face, hesitated.
Once he had done that, he should have admitted to himself that he had abandoned hope, and he realized that he could not bring himself, even after five years, to that admission.