“I know—I know.... The banner of Christ is broader.... You say he was kneeling here beside you?”
“Here—so close that I touched him.... And then you said.... Christian burial—absolution——”
“He was a spy?”
“What am I, Father?”
“Absolved, child—like this poor boy, here at your feet.... What is that locket in your hand?”
“His picture.... I found it in his house when the cavalry were setting fire to it.... Oh, I am tired of it all—deathly, deathly sick!... Look at him lying here! Father, Father, is there no end to death?”
The priest rose wearily; through the back-drifting smoke the long battle line of the Excelsiors wavered like phantoms in the mist. Six flags flapped ghostlike above them, behind them men writhed in the trampled, bloody grass; before them the sheeted volleys rushed outward into darkness, where the dull battle lightning played.
A maimed, scorched, blackened thing in the grass near by was calling on Christ; the priest went to him, turning once on his way to look back where the Special Messenger knelt beside a dead man who lay smiling at nothing through his shattered eyeglasses.