Henniker had turned, for one long look—the last, he thought—at his son. All the singleness and passion of the mother, the fire and grace and daring of the father, were in the promise of his childish face and form. He flushed, not a self-conscious, but an honest, generous blush, and took his hat away off his head to the lame Coxeyite—"because I was mean to him; and they are down and done for now, the Coxeys."
"Whose kid is that?" asked the man who walked beside Henniker, seeing the gesture and the look that passed between the man and the boy. "He's as handsome as they make 'em," he added, smiling.
Henniker did not reply in the proud word "Mine." A sudden heat rushed to his eyes, his chest was tight to bursting. He pulled his hat down and tramped along. The shuffling feet of the prisoners passed on down the middle of the street; the double line of guards kept step on either side. The dust arose and blended the moving shapes, prisoners and guards together, and blotted them out in the distance.
Callie had not seen her old lover at all. "Great is the recuperative power of the human heart." She had been looking at Corporal Niles, who could not turn his well-drilled head to look at her. But a side-spark from his blue eye shot out in her direction, and made her blush and cease to smile. Corporal Niles carried his head a little higher and walked a little straighter after that; and Callie went slowly through the gates, and sat a long while on one of the benches in the park, with her elbow resting on the iron scroll and her cheek upon her hand.
She was thinking about the Coxeyites' sentence, and wondering if the cavalry would have to go down to the stockade prison on the Snake; for in that case Corporal Niles would have to go, and the wedding be postponed. Everybody knows it is bad luck to put off a wedding-day; and besides, the yellow roses she had promised her corporal to wear would all be out of bloom, and no other roses but those were the true cavalry yellow.
But the cavalry did not go down till after the wedding, which took place on the evening appointed, at the Meadows cottage, between "Sound off" and "Taps." The ring was duly blessed, and the father's and mother's kiss was not wanting. The primrose radiance of the summer twilight shone as strong as lamplight in the room, and Callie, in her white dress, with her auburn braids gleaming through the wedding-veil and her lover's colors in the roses on her breast, was as sweet and womanly a picture as any mother could wish to behold.
When little Ross came up to kiss the bride, he somehow forgot, and flung his arms first around Corporal Niles's brown neck.
"Corporal, I'm twice related to the cavalry now," said he. "I had a father in it, and now I've got an uncle in it."
"That's right," the corporal agreed; "and if you have any sort of luck you'll be in it yourself some day."
"But not in the ranks," said Ross firmly. "I'm going to West Point, you know."