CHAPTER XIV—­SOLDIER BOY—­TO HIMSELF

It is five months.  Or is it six?  My troubles have clouded my memory.  I have been all over this land, from end to end, and now I am back again since day before yesterday, to that city which we passed through, that last day of our long journey, and which is near her country home.  I am a tottering ruin and my eyes are dim, but I recognized it.  If she could see me she would know me and sound my call.  I wish I could hear it once more; it would revive me, it would bring back her face and the mountains and the free life, and I would come—­if I were dying I would come!  She would not know me, looking as I do, but she would know me by my star.  But she will never see me, for they do not let me out of this shabby stable—­a foul and miserable place, with most two wrecks like myself for company.

How many times have I changed hands?  I think it is twelve times—­I cannot remember; and each time it was down a step lower, and each time I got a harder master.  They have been cruel, every one; they have worked me night and day in degraded employments, and beaten me; they have fed me ill, and some days not at all.  And so I am but bones, now, with a rough and frowsy skin humped and cornered upon my shrunken body—­that skin which was once so glossy, that skin which she loved to stroke with her hand.  I was the pride of the mountains and the Great Plains; now I am a scarecrow and despised.  These piteous wrecks that are my comrades here say we have reached the bottom of the scale, the final humiliation; they say that when a horse is no longer worth the weeds and discarded rubbish they feed to him, they sell him to the bull-ring for a glass of brandy, to make sport for the people and perish for their pleasure.

To die—­that does not disturb me; we of the service never care for death.  But if I could see her once more! if I could hear her bugle sing again and say, “It is I, Soldier—­come!”

CHAPTER XV—­GENERAL ALISON TO MRS. DRAKE, THE COLONEL’S WIFE

To return, now, to where I was, and tell you the rest.  We shall never know how she came to be there; there is no way to account for it.  She was always watching for black and shiny and spirited horses—­watching, hoping, despairing, hoping again; always giving chase and sounding her call, upon the meagrest chance of a response, and breaking her heart over the disappointment; always inquiring, always interested in sales-stables and horse accumulations in general.  How she got there must remain a mystery.