He was right. There on the rough planking of the carriage way lay the old pioneer, motionless, just as he had fallen not five minutes before. The hat upon his head and his right hand in his pocket told that he had fallen while standing in the door waiting for the drayman. His eyes were closed as if in sleep, and no sign of injury could be seen.
Kneeling by his side I laid my hand on his breast. It was still! His heart invincible through so many years had ceased to beat. His breath was gone and his empty left hand, gracefully lax, lay at his side. The veteran pioneer had passed to that farther West from whose vague savannahs no adventurer has ever returned.
"He must have died on his feet," said my uncle gravely, tenderly.
"Yes, he went the way he wished to go," I replied with a painful stress in my throat.
Together we took him up and bore him to the house, and placed him on the couch whereon he had been wont to rest during the day.
I moved like a man in a dream. It was all incredible, benumbing. Tenderly I disposed his head on its pillow and drew his hands across his breast. "Here is the end of a good man," I said. "Another soldier of the Union mustered out."
His hands, strong, yet singularly refined, appealed to me with poignant suggestion. What stern tasks they had accomplished. What brave deeds they had dared. In spite of the hazards of battle, notwithstanding the perils of the forests, the raft, the river, after all the hardships of the farm, they remained unscarred and shapely. The evidence of good blood was in their slender whiteness. Honorable, skilful, indefatigable hands,—now forever at rest.
My uncle slipped away to notify the coroner, leaving me there, alone, with the still and silent form, which had been a dominant figure in my world. For more than half a century those gray eyes and stern lips had influenced my daily life. In spite of my growing authority, in spite of his age he had been a force to reckon with up to the very moment of his death. He was not a person to be ignored. All his mistakes, his weaknesses, faded from my mind, I remembered only his heroic side. His dignity, his manly grace were never more apparent than now as he lay quietly, as though taking his midday rest.
A breath of pathos rose from the open book upon his table. His hat, his shoes, his gloves all spoke of his unconquerable energy. I thought of the many impatient words I had spoken to him, and they would have filled me with a wave of remorse had I not known that our last day together had been one of perfect understanding. His final night with us had been entirely happy, and he had gone away as he had wished to go, in the manner of a warrior killed in action. His unbending soul had kept his body upright to the end.
All that day I went about the house with my children like one whose world had suddenly begun to crumble. The head of my house was gone. Over and over again I stole softly into his room unable to think of him as utterly cold and still.