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Updated: May 19, 2025
The soldier held a long, heavy staff planted on one stirrup, from the top of which drooped in the dull air the once gay guidon, battle-rent and sodden with rain, and as he went he shouted at intervals, "Dovinger's Bangers! Rally on the guidon!" Now and again his strident boyish voice varied the appeal, "Hyar's yer Dov-inger's Rangers! Bally, boys! Rally on the reserve!"
Once the sullen, melancholy boom of distant cannon shook the clouds, and then was still, and ever and again sounded that tireless cry, "Dovinger's Rangers. Hyar's yer guidon! Rally, boys! Rally on the guidon! Rally on the reserve!" The senior surgeon, as the road wound near, stepped down toward it when the horseman, still holding himself proudly erect, passed by.
Guide right!" he shouted suddenly. "Dovinger's Rangers! Rally on the guidon, boys! Rally on the reserve!" It was a time that hardened men's hearts. The young soldier had no physical hurt that might appeal to the professional sympathies of the senior surgeon, and he turned away with a half laugh. "Let him go along! He can't rally Dovinger's Rangers this side of the river Styx, it seems."
And still the reflection of the burning house reddened the gloomy west, and still the cry, "Rally on the guidon! Dovinger's Rangers!" smote the thick air. Suddenly it was silent. The white horse that had been visible in the flare from the flaming house, now and again flung athwart the landscape, no longer loomed in the vista of the shadowy road.
And still through all echoed the cry, "Rally on the guidon! Dovinger's Rangers! Rally on the reserve!" The bridge that crossed the river, which was running full and foaming, had been burnt; but a span, charred and broken, still swung from the central pier.
"I 'm through with this," the young mountaineer exclaimed abruptly, with an eloquent gesture of renunciation toward the deserted card-table visible through the vista of open doors. "I'm going home to work! I'll never forget that I was marker in Dovinger's Rangers. I carried the guidon! And that last day I marked their way to glory!
"And, gentlemen," he continued, turning in his chair, the fire kindling in his eyes as it died in the bowl of his pipe, "not one man responded, for none could rise from that horrid slaughter." There was a moment of tense silence. Then, "Back and forth the guidon flaunted, and the rain began to fall, and the night came on, and still the dusk echoed the cry, 'Guide right! Dovinger's Rangers!
Each seemed hard on the heels of its precursor. Change ran riot in the ordering of the world, and its aspect was utterly transformed when Casper Girard, no longer bearing the guidon of Dovinger's Rangers, came out of the war with a captain's shoulder-straps, won by personal fitness often proved, the habit of command, and a great and growing opinion of himself. He was a changeling, so to speak.
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