When he had finished reading the letter, the man held it in his hand and said nothing. Neither did he see anything in the room about him. His eyes were piercing the distance, gazing on a blue-coated stripling in Meade’s army down among the Virginia hills.
The woman was the first to speak. There was no longer in her face the strain of grief or anxiety, the steady look of pain. Her eyes were shining and tearless. Her hands were clasped.
“Rhett,” she said, “I’m proud of him. He’s the bravest boy in the world. What a splendid, splendid letter!”
For one moment the mother’s pride in her offspring asserted itself, the spirit of her Kentucky ancestors shone forth in her countenance, and she spoke the words that came straight from her heart to her lips. Then, suddenly realizing that for the first time in all their twenty years of married life, she had expressed a thought in direct antagonism to the opinion of the husband whom she honored and loved, she sank back into a chair, pale-faced and silent, and let her hands fall dejectedly to her side.
But there was no protest from him. Instead, with a look in his eyes which she could not quite fathom, he came over and sat down by her and kissed her and said:—
“We are both proud of his spirit, Mary, however mistaken his conduct. But he is too good a boy for us to permit him to be lost and destroyed in this awful whirlpool of war. We must get him back.”
Late in the evening of that day there came a knock at the kitchen door of the Bannister house. When the door was opened some one from the outer darkness thrust in a scrap of paper and disappeared. On the paper was scrawled:—
“Rounding-up squad expected at Scranton to-night. Look out!”
When Rhett Bannister read the warning, he said:—
“It makes little difference now. It simply hastens my departure. Doubtless the end will be the same.”