The gripe of the sentinels held me as if in fetters of iron; the world seemed to rock and reel under me, a sea of blood seemed eddying before my eyes; the young day was dawning, and murder was done in its early hours, and I was held there to look on,--its witness, yet powerless to arrest it! I heard the formula--so hideous then!--"Make ready!"--"Present!"--"Fire!" I saw the long line of steel tubes belch out their smoke and flame. I heard the sullen echo of the report roll down from the mountains above. When the mist cleared away, the three figures stood no longer clear against the sunlight; they had fallen.
With the mad violence of desperation I wrenched myself from my guards, and staggered to him where he lay; he was not quite dead yet; the balls had passed through his lungs, but he breathed still; his eyes were unclosed, and the gleam of a last farewell came in them. He smiled slightly, faintly once more.
"She will know how I loved her now. Tell her I died for her," he said softly, while his gaze looked upwards to the golden sun-rays rising in the east.
And with these words life passed away, the smile still lingering gently on his lips;--and I knew no more, for I fell like a man stunned down by him where he was stretched beside the grave that they had hewn for him ere he was yet dead.
I knew when I saw him there, as well as I knew by detail long after, that he had offered his life for Stuart Lane's, and that it had been accepted; the Virginian, ignorant of the sacrifice made for him, had been sent to the Southern lines during the night, told by the Northerners that he was pardoned on his parole to return in his stead a distinguished Federal officer lately captured by him. He knew nothing, dreamt nothing, of the exchange by which his life was given back to the woman who loved him, when his English Leader died in his place as the sun rose over the fresh summer world, never again to rise for those whose death-shot rang sullen and shrill through its silence.
So Deadly Dash died, and his grave is nameless and unknown there under the shadow of the great Virginian forests. He was outlawed, condemned, exiled, and the world would see no good in him; sins were on him heavily, and vices lay darkly at his door; but when I think of that grave in the South where the grass grows so rankly now, and only the wild deer pauses, I doubt if there was not that in him which may well shame the best amongst us. We never knew him justly till he perished there.