As the soldiers waited orders on the south side of the river, Doctor Horace Carey left his work and sought out Thaine’s company, impelled by the same instinct that once turned him from the old Sunflower Trail to find Virginia Aydelot lost on the solitary snow-covered prairie beyond Little Wolf Creek.
“What’s before you now?” the doctor asked, as he and Thaine sat on the ground together.
“The Rio Grande now. We must be nearly to the end if we rout General Luna here,” Thaine replied.
“You’ve stood it well. I guess you don’t need me after all,” Carey remarked.
“I always need you, Doctor Carey,” Thaine said earnestly. “Never more than now. When I saw Captain Clarke wounded and carried away on the other side of the Tulijan, and could only say ’Captain, my captain,’ I needed you. When Captain Elliot was killed, I needed you; and when Captain William Watson was shot and wouldn’t stay dead because we need him so, and when Metcalf, Bishop, Agnew, Glasgow, Ramsey, and Martin, and 327 all the other big-brained fellows do big things, I need you again. Life is a great game; I’m glad I’m in it.”
Horace Carey had never before seen Thaine’s bright face so alert with manly power and beauty and thoughtfulness. War had hardened him. Danger had tried him. Human needs, larger than battle lines alone can know, had strengthened him. Vision of large purposes had uplifted him. As he stood before the white-haired physician whom he had loved from earliest memory, Carey murmured to himself:
“Can the world find grander soldiers to fight its battles than these sun-browned boys from our old Kansas prairies?”
“We are going across to Luna’s stronghold in a few minutes. Watch him go into eclipse before Fred Funston. If you stand right here, you’ll see me helping at the job. Good-by,” Thaine declared, and, at the bugle call, fell into his place.
Beyond the river a steady fire was opened on the American forces, and no bridge nor boat was there by which to cross. Doctor Carey stood watching the situation with a strange sense of unrest in his mind.
“There must be rafts,” declared Colonel Funston.