“How is the Colonel?” he asked.

“I think that he is near his end,” Jack answered.  “He has expressed a wish to feel your hand again.”

“Let us go to him at once,” said the other.  “There has been no greater man in the army.”

Together they went to the bedside of the faithful scout.  The General took his hand.  Margaret put her lips close to Solomon’s ear and said: 

“General Washington has come to see you.”

Solomon opened his eyes and smiled.  Then there was a beauty not of this world in his homely face.  And that moment, holding the hand he had loved and served and trusted, the heroic soul of Solomon Binkus went out upon “the lonesome trail.”

Jack, who had been kneeling at his side, kissed his white cheek.

“Oh, General, I knew and loved this man!” said the young officer as he arose.

“It will be well for our people to know what men like him have endured for them,” said Washington.

“I shall have to learn how to live without him,” said Jack.  “It will be hard.”

Margaret took his arm and they went out of the door and stood a moment looking off at the glowing sky above the western hills.

“Now you have me,” she whispered.

He bent and kissed her.

“No man could have a better friend and fighting mate than you,” he answered.

3

“‘We spend our years as a tale that is told,’” Jack wrote from Philadelphia to his wife in Albany on the thirtieth of June, 1787:  “Dear Margaret, we thought that the story was ended when Washington won.  Five years have passed, as a watch in the night, and the most impressive details are just now falling out.  You recall our curiosity about Henry Thornhill?  When stopping at Kinderhook I learned that the only man of that name who had lived there had been lying in his grave these twenty years.  He was one of the first dreamers about Liberty.  What think you of that?  I, for one, can not believe that the man I saw was an impostor.  Was he an angel like those who visited the prophets?  Who shall say?  Naturally, I think often of the look of him and of his sudden disappearance in that Highland road.  And, looking back at Thornhill, this thought comes to me:  Who can tell how many angels he has met in the way of life all unaware of the high commission of his visitor?

“On my westward trip I found that the Indians who once dwelt in The Long House were scattered.  Only a tattered remnant remains.  Near old Fort Johnson I saw a squaw sitting in her blanket.  Her face was wrinkled with age and hardship.  Her eyes were nearly blind.  She held in her withered hands the ragged, moth eaten tail of a gray wolf.  I asked her why she kept the shabby thing.

“‘Because of the hand that gave it,’ she answered in English.  ’I shall take it with me to The Happy Hunting-Grounds.  When he sees it he will know me.’

“So quickly the beautiful Little White Birch had faded.