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No one occupied the windowless log cabin; but there was the potato patch an oasis of food in a desert of starvation. They paused long enough at the cabin to boil a great kettleful and to feast ravenously. This gave them strength to tramp on to Kamloops. We saw that the Irish mother, Mrs Shubert, with her two children, accompanied this party.
Shubert, with his moody romances, was her favorite composer. The melancholy of that sad music had a peculiar fascination for her in her solitude. Her passionate, tumultuous soul seemed to fall into a languorous enervation under the fragrance of the orange blossoms.
The only change was that, owing to scarcity of fuel, no watch-fires were built. As Thurstane expected an attack, and as Indian assaults usually take place just before daybreak, he chose the first half of the night for his tour of sleep. At one he was awakened by Sweeny, who was sergeant of his squad, Kelly being with Meyer and Shubert with Coronado. "Well, Sweeny, anything stirring?" he asked.
Thus it is that the ordinary sympathies of humanity for the suffering and for the dead are suspended. Looking at Shubert, our lieutenant simply said to himself, "I have lost a man. My command is weakened by so much." Then his mind turned with promptness to the still living and urgent incidents of the situation. Could he peep out of the doorway without getting an arrow through the head?
I was greatly relieved on my cousin's account when I heard the voice of our military chieftain here." Then came more flattery for Ralph, with proper rations for the two privates. Those faithful soldiers he must show his gratitude to them; he had forgotten them in the basest manner. "Here, Pedronillo, take these cigaritos to privates Kelly and Shubert, with my compliments.
"I s'pose you'll want to dig a hole for him" he said, coming into the Casa and looking wistfully at the body of poor young Shubert. Sergeant Meyer motioned him to go away. Thurstane was entering in his journal an inventory of the deceased soldier's effects having already made a minute of the date and cause of his death.
Louis, and three recruits for the company, Kelly, Shubert, and Sweeny. Weber, a sunburnt German, with sandy eyelashes, blue eyes, and a scar on his cheek, had been a soldier from his eighteenth to his thirtieth year, and wore the serious, patient, much-enduring air peculiar to veterans.
The weather was uniformly fine on the nights when I went to the theatre. I was particularly fortunate in having neighbors at most of the plays who were not afflicted with coughs or a desire to explain the plot to their wives. I have shaken hands with A. L. Erlanger and been nodded to on the street by Lee Shubert.
By this time Texas Smith, Coronado, and Shubert had leaped up, got their senses about them, and commenced a fire of rifle shot, pistol shot, and buck-and-ball. In another half minute nothing remained in the doorway but two or three corpses, while outside there were howls as of wounded. The attack here was repulsed, at least for the present.
At sundown came the funeral of the soldier Shubert. The body, wrapped in a blanket, was borne by four Mexicans to the grave which had been prepared for it, followed by his three comrades with loaded muskets, and then by all the other members of the party, except Mrs. Stanley, who looked down from her roof upon the spectacle.
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