“Poor colonel!” continued La Croix. “Well, I love to think he died like a soldier, and not like some of my poor comrades, hashed to atoms, and not a volley fired over him. I hope they put a stone over him, for he was the best soldier and the best general in the army.”
“O sir!” cried Josephine, “there is no stone even to mark the spot where he fell,” and she sobbed despairingly.
“Why, how is this, Private Dard?” inquired La Croix, sternly.
Dard apologized for his comrade, and touching his own head significantly told them that since his wound the sergeant’s memory was defective.
“Now, sergeant, didn’t I tell you the colonel must have got the better of his wound, and got into the battery?”
“It’s false, Private Dard; don’t I know our colonel better than that? Would ever he have let those colors out of his hand, if there had been an ounce of life left in him?”
“He died at the foot of the battery, I tell you.”
“Then why didn’t we find him?”
Here Jacintha put in a word with the quiet subdued meaning of her class. “I can’t find that anybody ever saw the colonel dead.”
“They did not find him, because they did not look for him,” said Sergeant La Croix.