Carolus Depew was a selfish person, for all his apparent devotion to his friend. Having arrived at Gettysburg, he had found the monument, and he had impatiently hunted for the place of Gunner Criswell's Battery B, and guided his hand to the raised letters, and then had left him alone.
"I've found it!" he shouted, a moment later. "'Carolus Depew, Corporal,' big as life. 'Carolus Depew, Corporal'! What do you think of that, say! It'll be here in a hundred years, 'Carolus Depew, Corporal'!"
Then Carolus wandered a little farther along the line of tablets and round to the other side of the great monument. Gunner Criswell called to him lightly, as though measuring the distance he had gone. When Carolus did not answer, Gunner Criswell spoke to a boy who had offered him souvenir postal cards. It was like him to take his joy quietly, intensely.
"Will you read the names of this battery for me?" he asked.
The boy sprang as though he had received a command. It was not only the man's blindness which won men and women and children; his blindness was seldom apparent; it was his air of power and strength.
The boy read the list slowly and distinctly, and then refused the nickel which Criswell offered him. In a moment Carolus returned, still thrilled by his own greatness, as excited as a child.
"We must hunt a place to stay now," he said. "This is a grand spot. There's monuments as far as the eye can reach. Come on. Ain't you glad to walk with 'Carolus Depew, Corporal'?"
It was three o'clock in the afternoon when Carolus left Gunner Criswell on a doorstep in Gettysburg and went in search of rooms. At a quarter to six the blind man still sat on the same spot. He was seventy years old and he was tired, and the cold step chilled him through. He did not dare to move; it seemed to him that thousands of persons passed and repassed. If he went away, Carolus could not find him. And where should he go? He felt tired and hungry and worn and old; his great experience of the afternoon neither warmed nor fed him; he wished himself back in his own place with his work and his peace of mind and Ellen.
Then, suddenly, he realized that some one was speaking to him. The voice was a woman's, low-pitched, a little imperious, the voice of one not accustomed to be kept waiting.