There was surely one thing the Colonel's two "boys" had in common: they both had the same devouring passion for hero-stories.
During almost every spring evening of that year, by a bedside in a cool Northern home, a pretty young mother had sat and told to an eager little lad thrilling tales of bravery and courage. Always she began with the one the Colonel had told to G. W.—the story of the crippled boy in the old castle turret. There was something in that legend that stirred Jack Austin in a wonderful manner.
It had been hard for Jack to be separated from his father from the first; but now, whenever he heard from his father's letters about G. W., and realized that among war's perils there could be a place for a small boy, his heart simply ached with longing. G. W., a boy little older than himself, was there beside Daddy! But at this point Jack always recalled the story of the gauntlet and the small sword, and stifled back the tears and looked lovingly at his pretty mother. No matter how he envied G. W., he would stay, patient, in his "turret chamber." His place was beside his mother until Daddy came marching home. How many times his father had sent him that message! Jack dreamed almost every night of his father coming home, keeping step to the cheerful drum; so he had marched away, and so he would return, with G. W. at his side!
Near his bed, at night, always lay Jack's own splendid suit of make-believe soldier clothes. It was hard sometimes for him to think that they were make-believe clothes, while the suit of blue his mother had sent to G. W. were real, true ones, and worn by the dusky little soldier who lived in his dear father's tent. There often seemed to him an unendurable difference between G. W. and himself.
Poor little Jack! he was braver than he realized when he turned away from this feeling and smiled up into his mother's face.
But Jack's mother knew all about this feeling.
"And so you see, dear," the stories for Jack always ended, "that though you are but mother's obedient little boy now, your chance in the great world's work will come!"
And in the tent, beneath the glorious sunsets of Tampa, at about the same time "Daddy" would be sitting and smoking beside a small mattress bed, urging the same line of conduct upon another boy "hero" with a heart under the brown skin as pure and innocent as the one throbbing beneath the snowy night-gown so far away.
"Your chance will come, G. W.!"
And both boys generally fell asleep with the resolve that they would do the things and bear the things of the present, and "wait" without a murmur, because heroes had done the same since the world began.