He looked long and earnestly upon the calm features of the faces so closely pressed together. There was no pity, no remorse in his heart, for life and death were matters which touched him not at all. War was as the breath of his nostrils.
Presently he moved away. There was nothing to keep him there. These two had passed together to the shores of the Happy Hunting Ground. They had lived and died together. They would—perhaps—awake together. But not on the prairies of the West.
CHAPTER XXXIII
THE CAPITULATION
“I’d like to know how it’s all going to end.”
Mrs. Rickards drew a deep sigh of perplexity and looked helplessly over at Ma, who was placidly knitting at her husband’s bedside. The farmwife’s bright face had lost nothing of its comeliness in spite of the anxieties through which she had so recently passed. Her twinkling eyes shone cheerily through her glasses, and the ruddy freshness of her complexion was still fair to see. A line or two, perhaps, had deepened about her mouth, and the grayness of her hair may have become a shade whiter. But these things were hardly noticeable.
The change in Rosebud’s aunt was far more pronounced. She had taken to herself something of the atmosphere of the plains-folk in the few weeks of her stay at the farm. And the subtle change had improved her.
Rube was mending fast, and the two older women now spent all their spare time in his company.