The boy's voice wavered. Uncle Arthur saw him put up a thin hand and wipe his white little brow. Major David's plays were always intensely real to him.
"Not—the six hundred," he murmured, and sank down on the window-seat, gazing mournfully out over the square. But in a moment he was up again.
"Cannon to right of 'em," he began again, sternly. "Cannon to left of 'em——"
Uncle Arthur crept away without bidding him remember his promise. What is a Memorial Day address beside the charge of a Light Brigade?
It was only two days after this that David's mother summoned David's four uncles to a conference. David had no father. There was a granite boulder up in the cemetery which ever since David was four years old—he was ten now—had been draped once a year with a beautiful silken flag. All the Thorndyke men had been soldiers, and David's father had died at the front, where the Thorndyke men usually died. It was a matter of great pride to David every year—that silken flag.
David's four uncles were all soldiers—in a way. There was Uncle Chester; he had been breveted colonel at the close of the Civil War, and Colonel Thorndyke he was—against his will—always called still. Next came Uncle Stephen; he was a captain of artillery in the regular army, and had lately come home on a furlough, after three years' service in the Philippines. Then there was Uncle Stuart, just getting strong after an attack of typhoid fever. In a week he would be back at West Point, where he was a first classman and a cadet lieutenant. As for Uncle Arthur, David always regretted deeply that he was no longer in either volunteer or regular army, although he took some comfort from the fact that Uncle Arthur sometimes told him that he had never felt more like a soldier than he did now.
It was a hasty and a serious conference, this to which Mrs. Roger Thorndyke had summoned her dead husband's three brothers and his uncle. She felt the need of all their counsel, for she had a grave question to settle. She was a young woman with a sweet decisiveness of character all her own, yet when a woman has four men upon whom she can call for wisdom to support her own judgment, she would be an unwise person to ignore that fact.
"It's just this," she told them, when she had closed the door of Arthur's study, where they had assembled. "You know how long we've been hoping something could be done for David, and how you've all insisted that when Doctor Wendell should decide he was strong enough for the operation on the hip-joint we must have it. Well, he says a great English surgeon, Sir Edmund Barrister, will be here for just two days. He comes to see the little Woodbridge girl, and to operate on her if he thinks it best. And Doctor Wendell urges upon me that—it's my chance."
She had spoken quietly, but her face paled a little as she ended. Her youngest brother-in-law, Stuart, the cadet, himself but lately out of hospital, was first to speak.
"When does he come?"