“Not really!” said Van Sickles, as the chief made this odd announcement. “Well, I’m sorry on your account, sir.”
“He’s dead, poor old Bob!” said the colonel, resting his elbow upon the edge of his desk and letting his chin drop into the palm of his hand. “Yes, he’s got his papers at last. And now, Van, I can take up the story that I left unfinished. It was incomplete then, but now the last chapter’s been written.”
“You’ve had the first of it already,” went on the chief, settling back in his chair. “Here’s the rest of it—and the last of it. You’ll listen, too, Pollard.
“I’ve told you already, I think, that Bob Sheldon and I were the closest of friends. I stood up with him when he was married to his Nell—his ‘little Nell’—the girl whose name came to his lips when he lay in delirium after the shell had struck him down. Poor little Nell—poor old Bob! Well, all the trouble’s ended at last.
“The friendships that are made in active service are lasting ones. When the ‘Old Regiment’ came back, after doing its share of the work of hammering our erring brothers into a peaceful state, Bob was on the roster as major, and I’d been given his old company. But it never occurred to either of us, when off duty, that such a thing as rank had any existence. It was ‘Bob’ for him and ‘Harry’ for me, and he’d have thought me crazy if I’d addressed him as ‘Major’ except when I was at the head of my company.
“I’ll be older than I am now before I forget the day that we were mustered out. We’d gone to the front with something over the full thousand: there were three hundred and sixty of us, rank and file, when we came home again. For we’d been a fighting regiment from start to finish, and the hard knocks of four long years had cut the original roll to ribbons. Those were the days when veteran regiments were allowed to dwindle down to skeletons, through battle and disease, while the recruits that should have been turned over to them to stop the gaps were herded together in one raw, half useless lump, given a fresh regimental number and a stand of colors bright and crisp from the shop, and then bundled off to where there was fighting to be done—and all because some ambitious politician felt that a pair of eagles would be becoming to his peculiar style of corpulent beauty.
“We had a royal welcome home. I needn’t tell you what battles were gilded on the stripes of the old flag, because you know well enough the sort of record that we fellows made when cutting out the pace for you youngsters. We’d done our work, and we knew that we’d done it well, and we felt that the people knew it, too. And when we made our last march, that day, through the swarming streets, we took as rightfully ours the cheers that went up as the wreck of the ‘Old Regiment’ followed the faded colors home again.
“Then came the final breaking up; the time when ‘break ranks’ meant that regimental line never would be formed again. I remember how, for the last time, we presented to the colors—the ragged, blood-streaked scraps of silk whose worn folds told our whole war story. Bob turned to me when the tattered old things were being carried away from us forever. His face was working, and—I doubt, though, if he knew it—a big tear was rolling down each gaunt, sun-burned cheek. I—well, I was sobbing like a child, I’m not ashamed to say. So were the boys at my back—God bless ’em!
“‘Bob,’ says I, trying to swallow the lump in my throat, ‘Bob, old man, what’s left for us now?’ He turned in his saddle and looked across the parade to where a group of white gowns—his Nell was there, with the colonel’s wife and a lot of other women—had gathered to watch the last act in our war drama. ‘What’s left?’ says he, turning to me again, ‘What’s left? Why, everything!’ And though the tears still glistened at the corners of his eyes, his face shone with the light that has but one meaning.
“Well, we of the ‘Old Regiment’ shook hands, and drifted back to our places in civil life. There are easier things than dropping the customs of the service, and taking up the monotony of everyday existence. It came hard at first, but we managed it somehow.