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Backing up a little, Dane went down on one knee, his weapon ready to sweep over the bewildered natives, the drum resting on the earth against his body. Keeping the fire rod steady, his left hand went to work, not in the muted cadence the Khatkan drummer had chosen, but in hard and vigorous thumps which rolled across the clamor of the fight.
In short, so fascinated and absorbed was I in watching him as he greeted this man and the other that I started as though something had pricked me when I heard my name called by Colonel Clark. "Come here, Davy," he cried across the room, and I came and stood abashed before the hero. "General, allow me to present to you the drummer boy of Kaskaskia and Vincennes, Mr. David Ritchie."
Instead of looking sharply ahead, he looked this way and that way to see who was watching and admiring him. So he took no note of where he was going and started straight for the old tree trunk on which Drummer the Woodpecker was pounding out his warning of danger. Now Reddy Fox has sharp eyes and very quick ears. My, my, indeed he has!
And with Madame he gave us a welcome to warm our hearts after our journey. "David," he said, "I have seen many strange things happen in my life, but the strangest of all is that Clark's drummer boy should have married a Vicomtesse of the old regime." And she was ever Madame la Vicomtesse to our good friends in St. Louis, for she was a woman to whom a title came as by nature's right.
It's neither life nor death, but sleep, that dim gulf between. Mr. Egglestone, who has been much about the hospital from the first, enters with a radiant look, and steps lightly to Frank's side. The drummer boy's eyes unclose, and smile their welcome. "Better, still better, I am glad to see!" says the minister, cheerily. "Almost well," answered Frank, although so weak that he can hardly speak.
Old Fulcher, before he left the town with his son, and here it will be well to say that he and his son left it in a kind of triumph, the base drummer of a militia regiment, to whom they had given half-a-crown, beating his drum before them old Fulcher, I say, asked me to go and visit him, telling me where, at such a time, I might find him and his caravan and family; offering, if I thought fit, to teach me basket-making: so, after my father had been sent off, I went and found up old Fulcher, and became his apprentice in the basket-making line.
Indeed, I picked up much of that language in my intercourse with the inhabitants of Kaskaskia. How well I recall that simple life, its dances, its songs, and the games with the laughing boys and girls on the common! And the good people were very kind to the orphan that dwelt with Colonel Clark, the drummer boy of his regiment. But winter brought forebodings.
He, Jory, had nearly had a duel at the Cafe Baudequin on account of one of his last articles in 'The Drummer. The fact was he was giving it hot to the twopenny-halfpenny painters, the men with the usurped reputations!
Kerfoot in a ponderous way gave the details of a murder case, tried before him many years ago, in which the judge's charge so influenced the jury that the man was acquitted, and justly so, as was afterward proved. Yancey related an incident of the war, where he, only a drummer boy at the time, assisted, at great risk, in carrying a wounded comrade from the field.
Of course he told Drummer the Woodpecker, Tommy Tit the Chickadee, and Yank Yank the Nuthatch, who were over in the Old Orchard, and they at once hurried to the Green Forest, for they couldn't think of missing anything so exciting as would be the meeting between Lightfoot and the big stranger from the Great Mountain. Sammy didn't forget to tell Paddy the Beaver, but it was no news to Paddy.
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