Old soldiers who had served with the “major,” as they called him, stumped by with limping feet on wooden legs and on crutches. Poor men and poor women whom he had helped when they needed help, and without anybody being the wiser, dropped flowers on the pall. One old soldier broke through the line a second time for another look.
“I went to the war with him,” the old man said, “and I would not have come back but for him. He saw that I wasn’t forgotten in the hospital.” The apology was enough to excuse the old man’s breach of the rules in the eyes of the guard.
A little girl came along. She stopped long enough to press a kiss upon the glass above the dead face and then ran from the building with streaming eyes. One of the guards thought he saw her drop something and looked. He found it hidden away among the costly wreaths and clusters of roses and immortelles and almost priceless orchids. It was a little cluster of common, late blooming garden flowers, and to it was tied with a piece of thread a note written in a cramped childish hand:
DEAR MR. M’KINLEY: I wish
I could send you some prettier flowers,
but these are all I have. I am
sorry you got shot.
KATIE LEE.
That guard had a spark of poetry in his soul. He picked up the modest little bunch of flowers and tenderly laid it across a cluster of orchids.
“I thought I saw the President smile,” he said when he told a comrade.