“For nothing in the world, sir.” (Another pause.)
Then after a faint movement or two: “Sir, perhaps you’ll be kind enough to help me raise my right hand?”
The heavy, nearly helpless hand was raised and laid gently across his breast. He gave a sigh of seeming contentment and closed his eyes.
“Is that all, John?”
“That’s all, sir.”
“Good-night, then, John!”
“Good-night, sir!” he tenderly replied.
And my husband turned and walked quietly out of the room, to make his report to me, who, anxious and foreboding, was awaiting him. At the lifting of “Old John’s” hand I burst into tears. Ah! I thought, he needed no man’s help to lift that brawny right hand of his when he swore allegiance to the Constitution of the United States, or later when he took the solemn oath that made him a soldier under that beloved flag, beneath whose folds he now lay, old and broken! And even as the thought passed through my mind, a handful of pebbles came dashing against the window. We both sprang forward, and looking down we saw the terrified face of the gardener, gleaming white in the moonlight!
In his fright he babbled Scandinavian to us, but finally dragged from his unwilling throat one English word, “Come! come!”
My husband rushed with him down to the sick-room, and at the moment of their entrance found everything so precisely as he had left it that he felt angry at the man’s stupid fright. But before he could speak, three shadowy, gray forms slipped from the room, and the dog rose slowly, giving him a sullen, threatening look, then turned, and resting his heavy jaws on the foot of the bed, he lifted his great voice in one long, dismal howl, and dropped to his place again upon the floor, where he lay half growling, half groaning. Fearing that such a noise would disturb the sick man, my husband hurried to the bedside, and, laying his hand upon “Old John’s” head, he stood dumfounded, for from the body he touched life had flown!