Alford tarried but a moment with Clarke. As he spied Thaine and his comrades, he gave an instant’s glance of kindly recognition to the admiring young privates, and was gone. The three involuntarily rose to their feet, as if to follow him, and from three lusty throats they sent after him the beloved battle yell of the regiment, “Rock Chalk! Jay Hawk! K. U.!” then dropped to their places again and hugged the earth as the rifle balls whizzed about them.
“I’m glad I’m alive and I’m glad I know that man,” Thaine said to his neighbors.
“Alford’s a prince. I’ll bet he’ll clean that woods before he’s through. His work is always well done. Would you listen to that?” his comrade replied.
A tremendous crash of rifle shots seemed to split the jungle as the Kansas troops charged into it. The men 321 in the trenches lay flat to the earth while the balls fell about them or sang a long whining note through the air over them. Fiercer grew the fray, and louder roared the guns, and wilder the bullets flew, as the fighting lines swept over the enemy’s earthworks and struck with deadly force into the heart of its wooded cover.
Then came a lull for shifting the fighting grip. A relief force was hurried to the front and the first companies retired for a brief rest. They fell back in order, while the aids came trooping out of the brush in groups, bearing the wounded to places of shelter. Thaine Aydelot and his comrades lifted their heads above the earthworks for an instant. Captain Clarke sat near on a little knoll staring hard at a stretcher borne toward him by the aids. The manner of covering indicated a dead body on it.
“How different the captain’s face is from what it was before the attack,” Thaine thought, as he recalled the moment when Clarke had talked with Lieutenant Alford. And then the image of the young lieutenant’s face, so full of life and hope and power and gentleness, swept vividly across his mind.
“Who is it, boys?” Clarke called to the soldiers with the stretcher.
“Lieutenant Alford,” they answered.
Something black dropped before Thaine Aydelot’s eyes and Doctor Carey’s words stung like powder burns in his memory.
“Wait till you see a Kansas boy brought in, and count the cost again.”