"Beatrice! Beatrice!" Like another of her name she had led him through hell, and he saw now a certain sweet slavery in prospect. Wherever his thoughts might wander, she would always be with him, like the golden thread which runs through a dull tapestry, in and out of the design, sometimes hidden for an instant, but never lost.
Aunt Eleanor and Uncle John--they had been like father and mother to him, and he loved the children as though they were his own. The plaintive lisps of the little girl came back to his memory with remorseful tenderness, and he smiled as he wondered, dreamily, what Beatrice might have been at four or five. Swiftly upon the thought came another, which set the blood to singing in his veins, and which he put from him quickly, as one retreats before something too beautiful and too delicate to touch.
Captain Wells and Doctor Norton--they were dead. And Ronald--a lump came into his throat which he could not keep down, for, of all the men in the world, the blue-eyed soldier was best fitted to be his friend. They supplemented one another perfectly, each having what the other lacked, and enough in common to make firm neutral ground whereupon friendship might safely stand. Of his other friends at the Fort he thought idly, since he had not known them so well, but he was genuinely glad that they had survived the horrors of the day.
As night wore on, the battle assumed indistinct and indefinite phases. Here and there some incident stood out vividly; unrelated and detached. He had spoken truly when he told Beatrice that "a mere handful" had been lost. What, indeed, did such things matter in the face of history?
It was but the price of a new country, which courageous souls had been paying for two centuries and more, and which some must continue to pay until----
Like a lightning flash came sudden breadth of view. What if a thousand had died instead of fifty; how could it change the meaning? Broad and beautiful, from the Atlantic to the unknown shore unmeasured leagues away, stretched a new country, vast beyond the dreams of empire, which belonged to his race for the asking.
Something stirred in his pulses, uncertain but vital; so strangely elemental that it seemed one with the reaches of water that lay just beyond him. Here, at the head of Lake Michigan, some day there must be--what?