The Last Three Soldiers

by W. H. Shelton

Taking the glass from his trembling hand, Coleman leveled it on the house in the clearing; and, happily, there stood the woman, midway of the passage, and on the point of advancing into the light.

"Take her back, dear Philip," he said, returning him the telescope. "We will never steal her again—I and the other one. See, there she is!"

With a quick movement Philip looked, and without a spoken word he fell a-laughing and crooning in his delight, in a way so unnatural and so uncanny that it was sadder to see than his excitement.

The only chance of reclaiming Philip seemed to be in the direction of feigning sympathy with and interest in his delusion, trusting to time, in the absence of opposition, to bring him back to reason.

Never after this exhibition of petulance on the rocks with Lieutenant Coleman did he show the slightest tendency to violence. When he came in on that particular evening, the lieutenant took his hand, and in a few friendly words told him how glad he was that all was well and that the lost was found, and ordered the flag run up in honor of the occasion.

Philip looked in a dazed way at the flag, showing that that emblem had lost its old power to stir him with enthusiasm. All that summer, when his expert advice was sorely needed, poor infatuated Philip took no more interest in the construction of the golden mill than he took in the spots on the moon. He was as ignorant of the affairs of Sherman Territory as the Princess Smith, that plain, ignorant working-girl in the valley, was of his existence.

So week after week, and month after month, through the long summer and into the sad autumn days, his companions kept a melancholy watch on Philip, who wandered to and fro on the mountain, with the telescope in its leathern case strapped over his bare shoulders, as we saw him first in the shadow of the golden mill.

Scantily as the three soldiers were clad at that time, they still had their long blue overcoats to protect them from the cold of winter, and broken shoes to cover their feet; and so in the short December days poor Philip, grown nervous and haggard with want of sleep, strapped the telescope outside his coat, and wandered about the point of rocks.

The morning of January 10, as it dawned on the three forgotten soldiers,—if it may be said to have dawned at all,—cast a singular light on the mountain-top. It had come on to thaw, and the time of the winter avalanches was at hand. The sky overhead was of a colorless density which was no longer a dome; and it seemed to Philip, as he stood on the rocks, as if he could stretch out his hand and touch it. Somewhere in its depth the sun was blotted out. Ragged clouds settled below the mountain-top, and then, borne on an imperceptible wind, a sea of fog swallowed up the clouds and blotted out the valley and the ranges beyond, even as it had blotted out the sun, leaving Sherman Territory an island drifting through space.

Philip closed the telescope with a moan, and replaced it in its leathern case. Even the trees on the island, and the rocks heaped in ledges, grew gray and indistinct, and presently the thick mist resolved itself into a vertical rain falling gently on the melting snow. The strokes of an ax in the direction of the house had a muffled sound, like an automatic buoy far out at sea. Philip turned with another sigh, and took the familiar path in the direction of the ax, groping his way in the mist as a mountaineer feels the trail in the night with his feet.