And so he passed on. When he came to the cot where Rhett Bannister was lying, he gave him a word of simple greeting and would have gone by had not something in the man’s face attracted his attention and caused him to stop.
“Have I ever seen you before?” he inquired.
“Yes, Mr. President. I am Rhett Bannister from Pennsylvania. I spent a half-hour with you one morning in the Secretary’s room in the War Department, in the fall of ’63. I was an escaped conscript that morning.”
A smile of recognition lit up the face of the President, and his gnarled hand grasped the hand of the wounded man.
“I remember,” he said. “I remember very well. And have you been in the service ever since?”
Some one across the aisle, who had heard the conversation, replied that time for Bannister.
“Yes, Mr. President, he has. And he’s been the bravest and the best soldier in the ranks, bar none. I’m the adjutant of his battalion, and I know.”
“Good!” exclaimed the President. “Oh, that’s very good. I felt that we’d make a good soldier of him in the end. And, let’s see! There was a boy whose place you took. The boy went home.”
“No, Mr. President, he wouldn’t go, so we both stayed.”
“The boy wouldn’t go home? What became of him?”
“He’s here, Mr. President, on the next cot. We were both clipped at Five Forks.”
The President turned half round and looked incredulously on the pale face of the youth at his side. Then he took the boy’s two hands in both of his, and bent over him. There was no grace in the movement, there was no beauty of face or smoothness of diction to add charm to the incident; but Bob Bannister will remember to his last hour on earth how the great War President leaned over him and spoke.
“My boy, of such stuff are patriots and heroes made.”
Then, glancing at the wall where Bob’s frayed and dusty coat hung at the head of his cot, with the shoulder-straps of a first lieutenant half showing, he said, inquiringly:--
Lincoln looked down again at the boyish face beneath him.
And then the adjutant across the aisle spoke up for the second time.
“It’s quite true, Mr. President. And he has splendidly earned every step of his promotion.”
Still holding the boy’s hands and looking down into his face, the President said:--