Raynal suddenly rose, and walked rapidly to and fro, with his hands behind him.

“Poor colonel!” continued La Croix.  “Well, I love to think he died like a soldier, and not like some of my poor comrades, hashed to atoms, and not a volley fired over him.  I hope they put a stone over him, for he was the best soldier and the best general in the army.”

“O sir!” cried Josephine, “there is no stone even to mark the spot where he fell,” and she sobbed despairingly.

“Why, how is this, Private Dard?” inquired La Croix, sternly.

Dard apologized for his comrade, and touching his own head significantly told them that since his wound the sergeant’s memory was defective.

“Now, sergeant, didn’t I tell you the colonel must have got the better of his wound, and got into the battery?”

“It’s false, Private Dard; don’t I know our colonel better than that?  Would ever he have let those colors out of his hand, if there had been an ounce of life left in him?”

“He died at the foot of the battery, I tell you.”

“Then why didn’t we find him?”

Here Jacintha put in a word with the quiet subdued meaning of her class.  “I can’t find that anybody ever saw the colonel dead.”

“They did not find him, because they did not look for him,” said Sergeant La Croix.

“God forgive you, sergeant!” said Dard, with some feeling.  “Not look for our colonel!  We turned over every body that lay there,—­full thirty there were,—­and you were one of them.”

“Only thirty!  Why, we settled more Prussians than that, I’ll swear.”

“Oh! they carried off their dead.”

“Ay! but I don’t see why they should carry our colonel off.  His epaulets was all the thieves could do any good with.  Stop! yet I do, Private Dard; I have a horrible suspicion.  No, I have not; it is a certainty.  What! don’t you see, ye ninny?  Thunder and thousands of devils, here’s a disgrace.  Dogs of Prussians! they have got our colonel, they have taken him prisoner.”

“O God bless them!” cried Josephine; “O God bless the mouth that tells me so!  O sir, I am his wife, his poor heart-broken wife.  You would not be so cruel as to mock my despair.  Say again that he may be alive, pray, say it again!”

“His wife!  Private Dard, why didn’t you tell me?  You tell me nothing.  Yes, my pretty lady, I’ll say it again, and I’ll prove it.  Here is an enemy in full retreat, would they encumber themselves with the colonel?  If he was dead, they’d have whipped off his epaulets, and left him there.  Alive? why not?  Look at me:  I am alive, and I was worse wounded than he was.  They took me for dead, you see.  Courage, madame! you will see him again, take an old soldier’s word for it.  Dard, attention! this is the colonel’s wife.”

She gazed on the speaker like one in a trance.

Every eye and every soul had been so bent on Sergeant La Croix that it was only now Raynal was observed to be missing.  The next minute he came riding out of the stable-yard, and went full gallop down the road.