As for the captain, he sat down and regularly cried.  I’m sorry now I said anything against the captain, for he was a splendid man, and the pride of the battery.  And, I tell you, he wasn’t the only one that cried neither, for the boys idolised the old lady, and there wasn’t no singing that night or cards or anything.  I was on picket, and it was a heavy heart I took with me into the dark; and, when they left me laying in the grass, and nobody nearer nor a hundred yards and that behind me, I felt mortal blue and lonesome and homesick, and like I didn’t care whether I was killed or not.  It was midnight when I went out,—­mind, I say midnight—­ and I don’t know what ailed me that night, for, after thinking of the old lady and Benny and my own mother that was dead, and all the rest of the boys that had marched out so fine and ended so miserable—­I couldn’t keep the sleep away; and I’d go off and off, though I tried my damnedest not to; and my eyes would shut in spite of me and just glue together; and I would kind of drown, drown, drown in sleep.  If ever a man knew what he was doing, and the risk, and what I owed to the boys, and me a Regular, and all that—­it was me; yet—­yet—­And you must remember it had been a hard day, and the guns had stuck again and again in the mud, and it was pull, mule, pull, soldier, till you thought you’d drop in your tracks.  Oh, I am not excusing myself!  I’ve seen men shot for sleeping on guard, and I know it’s right; and, even in my dreams, I seemed to be reproaching myself and calling myself a stinker.

Then, just as I was no better nor a log, laying there with my head on my arm, a coward and a traitor, and a black disgrace to the uniform I wore, I suddenly waked up with somebody shaking me hard, real rough, like that—­and I jumped perfectly terrible to think it might be the captain on his rounds.  Oh, the relief when I saw it was nothing else than the old lady, she kneeling beside me all alone, and her specs shining in the starlight.

“William, William!” she said, sorrowful and warning, her voice kind of strange, like she didn’t want to say out loud that I had been asleep at my post; and, as she drew away her hand, it touched mine, and it was ice-cold.  And, just as I was going to tell her to lope back and be keerful of herself, the grass rustled in front of me, and I saw, rising like a wall, rows on rows of Filipino heads!  My, but didn’t I shoot and didn’t I run, and the bugles rang out and the whole line was rushed, me pelting in and the column spitting fire along a length of three miles!  We stood them off all right, and my name was mentioned in orders, and I was promoted sergeant, the brigadier shaking my hand and telling the boys I was a pattern to go by and everything a Regular ought to be.  But it wasn’t that I was going to tell.  It was about the old lady, though I didn’t learn it till the next day.

She had died at a quarter of midnight, and had lain all night on the captain’s bed with a towel over her poor old face.