“By Jove, that man died game,” he said, shaking his handkerchief at the flies. “We took both his legs off at the knee, and he just gripped the table hard and never winked an eyelash. I told him it would kill him, but he said he'd be hanged if he didn't take his chance—and he took it and died. Talk to me about nerve, that fellow had the cleanest grit I ever saw.”
Dan's pulses fluttered, as they always did at an example of pure pluck.
“What's his regiment?” he asked, watching the two slaves who, followed by their mistresses, were bringing the body back to the stretcher.
“Oh, he was a scout, I believe, serving with Stuart when he was wounded. His name is—by the way, his name is Montjoy. Any relative of yours, I wonder?”
Raising himself upon his elbow, Dan turned to look at the dead man beside him. A heavy beard covered the mouth and chin, but he knew the sunken black eyes and the hair that was like his own.
“Yes,” he answered after a long pause, “he is a relative of mine, I think;” and then, while the man lay waiting for his coffin, he propped himself upon his arm and followed curiously the changes made by death.
At his first recognition there had come only a wave of repulsion—the old disgust that had always dogged the memory of his father; then, with the dead face before his eyes, he was aware of an unreasoning pride in the blood he bore—in the fact that the soldier there had died pure game to the last. It was as a braggart and a bully that he had always thought of him; now he knew that at least he was not a craven—that he could take blows as he dealt them, from the shoulder out. He had hated his father, he told himself unflinchingly, and he did not love him now. Had the dead man opened his eyes he could have struck him back again with his mother's memory for a weapon. There had been war between them to the grave, and yet, despite himself, he knew that he had lost his old boyish shame of the Montjoy blood. With the instinct of his race to glorify physical courage, he had seen the shadow of his boyhood loom from the petty into the gigantic. Jack Montjoy may have been a scoundrel,—doubtless he was one,—but, with all his misdeeds on his shoulders, he had lived pure game to the end.
A fresh bleeding of Dan's wound brought on a sudden faintness, and he fell heavily upon Big Abel's arm. With the pain a groan hovered an instant on his lips, but, closing his eyes, he bit it back and lay silent. For the first time in his life there had come to him, like an impulse, the knowledge that he must not lower his father's name.