"See the good turn you did me."
While the two were cooking supper, the old Sergeant came up.
"If you don't obey orders next time," he said to Crittenden, sternly, for Abe was present, "I'll report you to the Captain." Crittenden had declined to take shelter during the fight—it was a racial inheritance that both the North and the South learned to correct in the old war.
"That's right, Governor," said Abe.
"The Colonel himself wanted to know what damn fool that was standing out in the road. He meant you."
"All right, Sergeant," Crittenden said.
When he came in from guard duty, late that night, he learned that Basil was safe. He lay down with a grateful heart, and his thoughts, like the thoughts of every man in that tropical forest, took flight for home. Life was getting very simple now for him—death, too, and duty. Already he was beginning to wonder at his old self and, with a shock, it came to him that there were but three women in the world to him—Phyllis and his mother—and Judith. He thought of the night of the parting, and it flashed for the first time upon him that Judith might have taken the shame that he felt reddening his face as shame for her, and not for himself: and a pain shot through him so keen that he groaned aloud.
Above him was a clear sky, a quarter moon, an enveloping mist of stars, and the very peace of heaven. But there was little sleep—and that battle-haunted—for any: and for him none at all.
And none at all during that night of agony for Judith, nor Phyllis, nor the mother at Canewood, though there was a reaction of joy, next morning, when the name of neither Crittenden was among the wounded or the dead.