I wept.
We men of the cavalry think more of our horses than we do of our friends and of our lovers. I wept! But then, in a sort of reaction to cold brutality, I drew my revolver, pressed the muzzle into Siegfried’s ear, closed my eyes, and fired. The noble body trembled for a brief second; then it lay limp and relaxed under that shroud of bush and cat-briar.
Coldly, mechanically, I returned my pistol to its place. Then I walked away, up toward the top of the second hill, where I sat down on the first stone I came to.
A quarter of an hour must have passed before I came really to myself and thought of considering the plight in which I found myself.
It was not an enviable one! Here I was, on foot, well off any beaten trail, virtually lost in the most lonesome waste of the mountains of Provence. I had passed a deserted hut some four miles back on the road. The battery on the Cap must be fully seven or eight miles further on beyond the fork. And my duty it was to get there regardless of my helplessness in that impenetrable thicket, from which twilight was rapidly fading now, yielding to black night.
VI
Again I beg of you who read me.... Believe! Believe! Believe!
I was seated on a stone, to one side of what I took for the path. My eyes turned down toward the hollow from which I had just come—the place where the body of my horse was lying. Then I looked in the other direction, over toward the first hump of the double saddle of three hills. I was intending to rise and start out on my way again. It was my duty.... I was in honor bound to make the summit of the Grand Cap, find the battery, deliver my dispatch.