During the brief wait at the station, Cadet Captain Prescott, standing before the company that he had commanded during this year, caught a brief glimpse of a familiar figure—-his mother. By chance Mrs. Prescott had journeyed to West Point on the same train.
Yet not a chance did Dick get for a word with his mother until long after. He was almost frenzied with eagerness for word of Laura, and this his mother would have, in some form, but he must wait until all the duties of the day had been performed and leisure had come to him.
Mrs. Prescott, on catching sight of her boy, felt a sudden, exultant throb in her mother heart. Then she stepped quickly back, fearful of attracting her lad's attention at a moment when he must give his whole thought to his soldier duties.
"My noble, manly boy!" thought the mother, with moistening eyes.
"I wonder if I do wrong to think him the noblest of them all?"
Dick had caught that one swift glance, but did not again see his mother, for his eyes were straight ahead.
When the time came for his particular company to wheel and swing into the now moving line of gray, Mrs. Prescott heard his measured, manly voice: "Fours left—-march!"
When the last company of cadets had fallen into line, Mrs. Prescott was one of the two dozen or so civilians who fell in at some distance to the rear, climbing the slope behind the moving line of gray. Wholly absorbed in the corps, Dick's mother had forgotten to board the stage that would have carried her to the hotel.
After the visitors had been left at the hotel, the corps marched away. Barely half an hour later, however, the two battalions again marched on to the plain. Then the most fascinating, the most inspiring of all military ceremonies was gone through with by the best body of soldiery in the world. The cadets of the United States Military Academy went through all the solemnity of dress parade. It is a sight which, once seen at West Point, can never be forgotten by a lover of his flag.
One bespectacled young spectator there was who found his breath coming in quick, sharp gasps as he looked on at this magnificent display. He was tall, yet with a slight stoop in his shoulders. His face was covered with a bushy, sandy beard. He was neither particularly well nor very badly dressed, and would have attracted little attention in any crowd.
Yet this stranger was not looking on a new sight. For nearly four years it had been as the breath of life to him.