“I’d never let you take my hand before, sir; just take it once now—­will you?—­while I can see you still.”

Their hands met as he asked it, and held each other close and long; all the loyal service of the one life, and all the speechless gratitude of the other, told better than by all words in that one farewell.

A light that was not from the stormy dusky morning shone over the soldier’s face.

“Time was, sir,” he said, with a smile, “when I need to think as how, some day or another, when I should have done something great and grand, and you was back among your own again, and they here had given me the Cross, I’d have asked you to have done that before all the Army, and just to have said to ’em, if so you liked, ’He was a scamp, and he wasn’t thought good for naught; but he kept true to me, and you see it made him go straight, and I aren’t ashamed to call him my friend.’  I used to think that, sir, though ’twas silly, perhaps.  But it’s best as it is—­a deal best, no doubt.  If you was only back safe in camp—–­”

“O God! cease!  I am not worthy one thought of love like yours.”

“Yes, you are, sir—­leastways, you was to me.  When you took pity on me, it was just a toss-up if I didn’t go right to the gallows.  Don’t grieve that way, Mr. Cecil.  If I could just have seen you home again in your place, I should have been glad—­that’s all.  You’ll go back one day, sir; when you do, tell the King I ain’t never forgot him.”

His voice grew faint as the last sentence stole from his lips; he lay quite still, his head leaned back against his mater; and the day came, with the north winds driving over the plains and the gray mists tossed by them to and fro like smoke.

There was a long silence, a pause in which the windstorm ceased, and the clouds of the loosed sands sunk.  Alone, with the wastes stretching around them, were the living and the dying man, with the horse standing motionless beside them, and, above, the gloom of the sullen sky.  No aid was possible; they could but wait, in the stupefaction of despair, for the end of all to come.

In that awful stillness, in that sudden lull in the madness of the hurricane, death had a horror which it never wore in the riot of the battlefield, in the intoxication of the slaughter.  There was no pity in earth or heaven; the hard, hot ground sucked down its fill of blood; the icy air enwrapped them like a shroud.

The faithfulness of love, the strength of gratitude, were of no avail; the one perished in agony, the other was powerless to save.

In that momentary hush, as the winds sank low, the heavy eyes, half sightless now, sought with their old wistful, doglike loyalty the face to which so soon they would be blind forever.

“Would you tell me once, sir—­now?  I never asked—­I never would have done—­but may be I might know in this last minute.  You never sinned that sin you bear the charge on?”