“What!” I flamed out, indignantly rising; “you intimate that Thurston is a coward—­and in his absence?”

“If he w—­ere a cow—­wow-ard h—­e w—­wouldn’t t-try to m-m-master it; and if he w—­ere p-present I w—­wouldn’t d-d-dare to d-d-discuss it,” was the mollifying reply.

This intrepid man, George Thurston, died an ignoble death.  The brigade was in camp, with headquarters in a grove of immense trees.  To an upper branch of one of these a venturesome climber had attached the two ends of a long rope and made a swing with a length of not less than one hundred feet.  Plunging downward from a height of fifty feet, along the arc of a circle with such a radius, soaring to an equal altitude, pausing for one breathless instant, then sweeping dizzily backward—­no one who has not tried it can conceive the terrors of such sport to the novice.  Thurston came out of his tent one day and asked for instruction in the mystery of propelling the swing—­the art of rising and sitting, which every boy has mastered.  In a few moments he had acquired the trick and was swinging higher than the most experienced of us had dared.  We shuddered to look at his fearful flights.

“St-t-top him,” said the quartermaster, snailing lazily along from the mess-tent, where he had been lunching; “h—­e d-doesn’t know that if h—­e g-g-goes c-clear over h—­e’ll w—­ind up the sw—­ing.”

With such energy was that strong man cannonading himself through the air that at each extremity of his increasing arc his body, standing in the swing, was almost horizontal.  Should he once pass above the level of the rope’s attachment he would be lost; the rope would slacken and he would fall vertically to a point as far below as he had gone above, and then the sudden tension of the rope would wrest it from his hands.  All saw the peril—­all cried out to him to desist, and gesticulated at him as, indistinct and with a noise like the rush of a cannon shot in flight, he swept past us through the lower reaches of his hideous oscillation.  A woman standing at a little distance away fainted and fell unobserved.  Men from the camp of a regiment near by ran in crowds to see, all shouting.  Suddenly, as Thurston was on his upward curve, the shouts all ceased.

Thurston and the swing had parted—­that is all that can be known; both hands at once had released the rope.  The impetus of the light swing exhausted, it was falling back; the man’s momentum was carrying him, almost erect, upward and forward, no longer in his arc, but with an outward curve.  It could have been but an instant, yet it seemed an age.  I cried out, or thought I cried out:  “My God! will he never stop going up?” He passed close to the branch of a tree.  I remember a feeling of delight as I thought he would clutch it and save himself.  I speculated on the possibility of it sustaining his weight.  He passed above it, and from my point of view was sharply outlined against the blue.  At this distance of many years I can