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Updated: May 14, 2025
There were many whispers beyond his door, and yet a great silence. He waited for a little, and then he opened his door and looked out. As he did so the bell for roll-call rang through the building, and he knew that it was his roll.
True, he had no friends there now; but what matter of that? Ah, yes, he was old, and the roll-call of his kindred showed him pitiful gaps. His mother! Ruth! But he had Naomi still. Naomi! He spoke her name aloud, softly, tenderly, caressingly, as if his wrinkled hand were on her hair. Then recovering himself, he laughed to think that he could be so childish.
In the half-light, they looked unreal and impossible, as though there had come upon us the inhabitants of some fantastic dream-world. My God! I thought I was mad. They swarmed in upon us in a great wave of murderous, living shadows. From some of the men who must have been going aft for roll-call, there rose into the evening air a loud, awful shouting.
He gets up betimes in the morning, asking: "Well, did I behave properly?" and dresses in haste, preoccupied about duty and the roll-call. Outside, no doubt, it is daylight already: through the tiny holes which time has pierced in our wooden panels, threads of morning light penetrate our chamber, and in the atmosphere of our room where night still lingers, they trace vague white rays.
The sentinels failed to respond at roll-call. As the King and the Colonel listened to the report of the escape, Karyl's face paled a little and the features of Von Ritz hardened. Orders were given for an instant dispatch in cipher, demanding from a secret agent in Algiers all information obtainable as to the movements of the Countess Astaride.
So day and night I knelt by her bed, holding her hand and watching the flame of her wonderful spirit grow dim. At times, even then, it blazed up with startling suddenness. On the last afternoon of her life, when she had lain quiet for hours, she suddenly began to utter the names of the women who had worked with her, as if in a final roll-call.
So here begins the roll-call by the by, old man, what between bee-hunting and buffaloe humps, and certain other matters, I have been too busy to ask your name; for I intend to begin with my rear-guard, well knowing that my man in front is too busy to answer." "Lord, lad, I've been called in my time by as many names as there are people among whom I've dwelt.
A shot or two heard somewhere in that obscurity counted as nothing with the long fusillade that had swept it in the daytime; the passing of a single life, more or less, amounted to little in the long roll-call of the day's slaughter. But with the first beams of the morning sun and the slowly moving "relief detail" from the camp came a weird half-resurrection of that ghastly field.
The nimble clerk had begun on the roll almost before the Speaker was through, and checked off the name. Bijah Bixby mopped his brow with a blue pocket-handkerchief. "My God," he said, "what a risk Jethro's took! they can't git through another roll-call. Jest look at Heth! Ain't he carryin' it magnificent? Hain't as ruffled as I be. I've knowed him ever sence he wahn't no higher'n that desk.
These, needless to say, were not parliamentarians, either. They had lacked a leader, they were stunned by the suddenness of the onslaught, and had not moved quickly enough. Like trapped animals, they wandered blindly about for a few moments, and then sank down anywhere. Each answered the roll-call sullenly, out of necessity, for every one of them was a marked man.
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