"You know, Buckie, that when a gun is fired, or lightning flashes miles and miles away, you wait and count the seconds until you hear the crash. There's not really an instant between flash and bang, but we have an illusion which we call time. It does not exist. Time's only a thing we imagine: the pause between flash and bang."
"The flash and bang of what?"
"Suppose it is a word, proceeding out of the mouth of God, which bids your soul to serve. Between the blaze and the report you enter time, born, living, gone, and all the long revolving years between of happiness and sorrow, sin and penance, the passions, loves, ambitions, triumphs, failures, from birth to death exist within this instant we call a human life. We are like falling stars, the meteor stones which rush through the eternities of space unseen, unknown, save for the moment's blazing transit of earth's atmosphere. But we are spirits lit by a word of God."
"Burned!"
"Yes. Dirt and water will make your mud, but it takes heat and pressure to turn common stuff to gems, burning for stars, torture to create poor creatures like ourselves into immortal spirits, and God alone knows what terrific ordeal exalts His angels until they can exist triumphant in His presence. I am ready, waiting, impatient, filled with ambitions I hardly dare to think of. The light is blinding."
"Aren't you afraid?"
"Awed, rather. I shall leave fear behind me. The blind are made to see, the dead are raised, we poor have the Gospel preached to us. Blessed are the blind, the poor, the dead, for even in Christ shall all be made alive, and death is swallowed up in victory."
So, rapt in contemplation, this dying felon saw not the walls which imprisoned his body, but visions of immeasurable grandeur through the wide gates of death.
VI
It would be morbid to dwell in detail on the last days, when many Indians were permitted to see the prisoner, when the men of D Troop who had hunted him to this death shook hands at parting, when the priest and I by turns sat with him while through the long hours we could hear the hammers at work upon the scaffold across our barrack square. At the very end of that, in the dusk, when our time came to part, I knelt to receive his blessing. Afterward, I sent my servant for Black Prince, and being off duty, spent most of the night out on the plains, where I could be alone. The stars were very bright, and on the uplands a touch of summer frost turned all the grass to silver. So the dawn broke, and far away I heard reveillé sound, like a great throbbing prayer cleaving the skies.