For a while they rode in silence back toward their camp. They passed under the aqueduct and entered the open plain. Then the parson stretched out his hand to the pommel of Driscoll’s saddle.
“Well?” he ventured softly.
“Well, Clem, it’s done.”
The others crowded their horses nearer.
“I want to tell you all,” Driscoll abruptly began again. “I want to tell you that I’ve just seen the strangest thing of my whole life, right back there in that tent. I–well, it’s simply flattened me out!”
“You mean Lopez, Din?” one asked tentatively.
“Lopez? No, no, there’s nothing strange in him. Any low hound will sell out to save his hide. No, Dan, I mean the other. I mean the old man. He’s the one who used to run the blockade off Mobile, and a whiter-livered, more contemptible old grandmother I never hope to see anywhere, no, never! Yet not a month ago, the day of that Cimatario scrimmage, I found him on the battlefield, and he had been wounded. But he didn’t seem to know it. He didn’t even seem to know that the shells were still banging all around him.”
“An old coward, too!” someone muttered.
“But wait. He used to be one thing worse, one thing more, than a coward. He was a miser, and such a miser that he made himself face danger. You should have seen him running a 436 blockade, with the Yankees chasing behind. He trembled–I tell you, he trembled like a withered cottonwood leaf on a broken stem. Yet he whined against stoking with turpentine, because it cost a little more. I’d ’a’ thought, I did then, that the miser was in his bones until the last trumpet. But to-night, back in that tent just now––”
“Well?”