And then the voice was muffled suddenly.  A little while later he entered the yard-gate and stopped in the moonlight and, from his window, Crittenden looked down and watched him.  The boy was going through the manual of arms with his buggy-whip, at the command of an imaginary officer, whom, erect and martial, he was apparently looking straight in the eye.  Plainly he was a private now.  Suddenly he sprang forward and saluted; he was volunteering for some dangerous duty; and then he walked on toward the house.  Again he stopped.  Apparently he had been promoted now for gallant conduct, for he waved his whip and called out with low, sharp sternness;

“Steady, now!  Ready; fire!” And then swinging his hat over his head: 

“Double-quick—­charge!” After the charge, he sat down for a moment on the stiles, looking up at the moon, and then came on toward the house, singing again: 

    “You’ll never find a man in all this world
    Who’ll love you half so well as I love you.”

And inside, the mother, too, was listening; and she heard the elder brother call the boy into his room and the door close, and she as well knew the theme of their talk as though she could hear all they said.  Her sons—­even the elder one—­did not realize what war was; the boy looked upon it as a frolic.  That was the way her two brothers had regarded the old war.  They went with the South, of course, as did her father and her sweetheart.  And her sweetheart was the only one who came back, and him she married the third month after the surrender, when he was so sick and wounded that he could hardly stand.  Now she must give up all that was left for the North, that had taken nearly all she had.

Was it all to come again—­the same long days of sorrow, loneliness, the anxious waiting, waiting, waiting to hear that this one was dead, and that this one was wounded or sick to death—­would either come back unharmed?  She knew now what her own mother must have suffered, and what it must have cost her to tell her sons what she had told hers that night.  Ah, God, was it all to come again?

V

Some days later a bugle blast started Crittenden from a soldier’s cot, when the flaps of his tent were yellow with the rising sun.  Peeping between them, he saw that only one tent was open.  Rivers, as acting-quartermaster, had been up long ago and gone.  That blast was meant for the private at the foot of the hill, and Crittenden went back to his cot and slept on.

The day before he had swept out of the hills again—­out through a blossoming storm of dogwood—­but this time southward bound.  Incidentally, he would see unveiled these statues that Kentucky was going to dedicate to her Federal and Confederate dead.  He would find his father’s old comrade—­little Jerry Carter—­and secure a commission, if possible.  Meanwhile, he would drill with Rivers’s regiment, as a soldier of the line.