“Yes, sir. Captain Stanley was our bandmaster—he wasn’t captain then, of course. He played us in at Sandy River—by God! I oughter know, because I got some cut up m’self.”
“You—you tell me that he wasn’t killed?” she repeated, steadying herself against the canvas flap.
“No, sir. I heard tell he was badly hurt—seems like I kinder remember—oh, yes!” The man’s face lighted up. “Yes, sir; Captain Stanley, he had a close shave! It sorter comes back to me now, how the burial detail fetched him back saying they wasn’t going to bury no man that twitched when they shut his coffin. Yes, sir—but it’s three years and a man forgets, and I’ve seen—things—lots of such things in three years with Baring’s dragoons. Yes, sir.”
She closed her eyes; a dizziness swept over her and she swayed where she stood.
“Is he here?”
“Who? Captain Stanley? Yes, sir. Why, he’s captain of the Black Horse troop—F, third squadron.... They’re down that lane near the trees. Shall I take you there?”
She shook her head, holding tightly to the canvas flap; and the trooper, saluting easily, resumed his truss of hay, hitched his belt, cocked his forage cap, and went off whistling.
All that sunny afternoon she lay on the colonel’s camp bed, hands tightly clenched on her breast, eyes closed sometimes, sometimes wide open, gazing at the sun spots crawling on the tent wall.
To her ears came bugle calls from distant hills; drums of marching columns. Sounds of the stirring of thousands made tremulous the dim silence of the tent.
Dreams long dead arose and possessed her—the confused dreams of a woman, still young, awakened from the passionless lethargy of the past.