This night by the Buffalo River was Florian's first experience of outpost duty, and he felt—though not the responsible party—anxious, wakeful, and weary after a long and toilsome day's march.
He knew enough of military matters to be well aware that the importance of outposts, especially when dealing with a wily and savage enemy, could scarcely be exaggerated, for no force, when encamped in the field, can be deemed for a moment safe without them. Thus it was a maxim of Frederick the Great that it was pardonable to be defeated, but never to be surprised.
'I don't understand all this change that has come over my life,' thought he, as he stretched himself on the bare earth near the picquet fire; 'but I wonder if my father and mother can see and think of me where they are. Yet I sometimes feel,' he added, with a kind of boyish gush in his heart, 'as if they were near me and watching over me, so they must see and think too.'
Where was Dulcie, then, and what was she doing? How supporting herself, as she said she would have to do? Had she found friends, or, months ago, been trodden, with all her tender beauty, down in the mire of misfortune and adversity?
These were maddening thoughts for one so far away and so utterly powerless to help her as Florian felt himself, and rendered him at times more reckless of his own existence because it was useless to her.
The air around was heavy with the dewy fragrance of strange and tropical plants, and vast, spiky, and fan-shaped leaves cast their shadows over him as he strove to snatch the proverbial 'forty winks' before again going 'the rounds,' or posting the hourly reliefs, for they are always hourly when before an enemy.
And when our weary young soldier did sleep, he dreamt, not of the quick-coming strife, nor even of blue-eyed Dulcie, with her wealth of red golden hair, but, as the tender smile on his lips might have showed, of the time when his mother watched him in his little cot, with idolizing gaze, and when he, the now bronzed and moustached soldier, was a little child, with rings of soft dusky hair curling over his white forehead; when his cheeks had a rosy flush, and his tiny mouth a smile, and she fondly kissed the little hands that lay outside the snow-white coverlet her own deft fingers had made—the two wee hands that held his mother's heart between them—the heart that had long since mouldered by Revelstoke Church.
And so he slept and dreamed till roused by the inevitable cry of 'Sentry, go!' and, that duty over, as he composed himself to sleep again, with his knapsack under his head for a pillow, he thought as a soldier—
'To-day is ours. To-morrow never yet
On any human being rose or set!'