“See the good turn you did me.”

While the two were cooking supper, the old Sergeant came up.

“If you don’t obey orders next time,” he said to Crittenden, sternly, for Abe was present, “I’ll report you to the Captain.”  Crittenden had declined to take shelter during the fight—­it was a racial inheritance that both the North and the South learned to correct in the old war.

“That’s right, Governor,” said Abe.

“The Colonel himself wanted to know what damn fool that was standing out in the road.  He meant you.”

“All right, Sergeant,” Crittenden said.

When he came in from guard duty, late that night, he learned that Basil was safe.  He lay down with a grateful heart, and his thoughts, like the thoughts of every man in that tropical forest, took flight for home.  Life was getting very simple now for him—­death, too, and duty.  Already he was beginning to wonder at his old self and, with a shock, it came to him that there were but three women in the world to him—­Phyllis and his mother—­and Judith.  He thought of the night of the parting, and it flashed for the first time upon him that Judith might have taken the shame that he felt reddening his face as shame for her, and not for himself:  and a pain shot through him so keen that he groaned aloud.

Above him was a clear sky, a quarter moon, an enveloping mist of stars, and the very peace of heaven.  But there was little sleep—­and that battle-haunted—­for any:  and for him none at all.

* * * * *

And none at all during that night of agony for Judith, nor Phyllis, nor the mother at Canewood, though there was a reaction of joy, next morning, when the name of neither Crittenden was among the wounded or the dead.

Nothing had been heard, so far, of the elder brother but, as they sat in the porch, a negro boy brought the town paper, and Mrs. Crittenden found a paragraph about a soldier springing into the sea in full uniform at Siboney to rescue a drowning comrade, who had fallen into the surf while trying to land, and had been sunk to the bottom by his arms and ammunition.  And the rescuer’s name was Crittenden.  The writer went on to tell who he was, and how he had given up his commission to a younger brother and had gone as a private in the regular army—­how he had been offered another after he reached Cuba, and had declined that, too—­having entered with his comrades, he would stay with them to the end.  Whereat the mother’s face burned with a proud fire, as did Phyllis’s, when Mrs. Crittenden read on about this Crittenden’s young brother, who, while waiting for his commission, had gone as a Rough Rider, and who, after gallant conduct during the first fight, had taken his place on General Carter’s staff.  Phyllis clapped her hands, softly, with a long sigh of pride—­and relief.

“I can eat strawberries, now.”  And she blushed again.  Phyllis had been living on bacon and corn-bread, she confessed shamefacedly, because Trooper Basil was living on bacon and hardtack—­little dreaming that the food she forced upon herself in this sacrificial way was being swallowed by that hearty youngster with a relish that he would not have known at home for fried chicken and hot rolls.