The patient man shook his head again. “It is against the rules of war.”
“Then curse the rules of war!” shouted the younger. “Are you a coward?”
The sheriff reached out and touched his brother’s arm. It was a secret, almost a timid, act. The brother threw off the appealing hand.
“Don’t touch me!” He spoke through set teeth. “If you are a coward and traitor, may you be damned through all eternity! Again! For the last time! Will you fight?”
The sheriff raised his hands, dumbly. The men went to their wagons and returned with arms.
He pointed into a field with a rough stone wall dividing its center three or four hundred yards from the road. This man was an old hunter, and the others had followed him often. He took command now as a matter of course.
The sheriff watched them flounder through the plowed field. He stood still, for a minute. Then he hurried to his house, emerged with a gun, and joined the party.
Two miles away a squad of ten cavalrymen cantered over a ridge and examined the country through their field-glasses. They studied the ground foot by foot, almost inch by inch. Satisfied, they trotted toward the village.
Around a turn they came on a little knot of women and children who scurried, screaming, into the ditch. A rider headed off a woman who was carrying a child. He stooped to her from his tall black horse. Laughing, he nodded and said something to her in a foreign language.
Stooping still lower, he snatched the child suddenly and swung it out of the trembling woman’s arm. He lifted it, and danced it up and down.
He fumbled in his saddle-bag and brought out some chocolate which he fed to the baby. Then he handed it back to the mother, roaring again with laughter at her frightened face. The other riders, laughing also, waved their hands at the group and cantered on.
They entered the village, swiftly examined it, riding through gardens and into alleys, assuring themselves that there was nothing there to mask danger for the troops that were behind them. They passed out of the other end and into the road leading past the plowed field with the stone wall.
It was still, and very lonely. There was not a living being in sight throughout all the softly tinted land. On a tree branch that hung over the stone wall, a bluebird began to sing with all the power of its little throat.