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Where is the charm of it all? Where are the elevated sentiments, the devotion, the heroism, the " From a point somewhere near, in the direction of the pursuing enemy, rose the clear, deliberate sing-song of Captain Armisted. "Stead-y, men stead-y. Halt! Com-mence fir-ing."
It was nothing very remarkable merely a weak woman's confession of unprofitable sin the penitence of a faithless wife deserted by her betrayer. The letter had fallen from the pocket of Captain Armisted; the reader quietly transferred it to his own. An aide-de-camp rode up and dismounted. Advancing to the Governor he saluted.
Anyhow he abated none of his dignity in recognition. "I understand," he said, gravely, "that some of my men are out there a company of the Tenth, commanded by Captain Armisted. I should like to meet him if you do not mind." "He is worth meeting.
Through an opening made by the fall of one of his men Captain Armisted sprang, with his dangling left arm; in his right hand a full-charged revolver, which he fired with rapidity and terrible effect into the thick of the gray crowd: but across the bodies of the slain the survivors in the front were pushed forward by their comrades in the rear till again they breasted the tireless bayonets.
Then he turned to Armisted, who also had risen, looked at him more coldly than before and said: "But the man would it not be better that he could not the country spare him better than it can spare you? Or are the Armisteds opposed to 'the unwritten law'?"
I am not, perhaps, much of a patriot, but I wish to be dead." The Governor looked at him rather sharply, then a little coldly. "There is a simpler and franker way," he said. "In my family, sir," was the reply, "we do not do that no Armisted has ever done that." A long silence ensued and neither man looked at the other.
To the civilian's eye the scene was one of carelessness, confusion, indifference; a soldier would have observed expectancy and readiness. At a little distance apart an officer in fatigue uniform, armed, sat on a fallen tree noting the approach of the visitor, to whom a sergeant, rising from one of the groups, now came forward. "I wish to see Captain Armisted," said the Governor.
The humor of the great is infectious; all laughed who heard. "Where is Captain Armisted?" the Governor asked, not altogether carelessly. The surgeon looked up from his work, pointing silently to the nearest body in the row of dead, the features discreetly covered with a handkerchief. It was so near that the great man could have laid his hand upon it, but he did not.
His face, tanned by exposure, was seamed as with age. A long livid scar across the forehead marked the stroke of a sabre; one cheek was drawn and puckered by the work of a bullet. Only a woman of the loyal North would have thought the man handsome. "Armisted Captain," said the Governor, extending his hand, "do you not know me?" "I know you, sir, and I salute you as the Governor of my State."
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