Five minutes more and
every man had lined up safely on the northward bank. In low tone the
order was given, starting as Ray ever did, in solid column of fours. In
dead silence the little command moved slowly away, followed by the eyes
of half the garrison on the bluff. Many of these were women and
children, who gazed through a mist of tears. Ray turned in saddle as the
last of his men went by; looked long at the dim light in the upper
window of his home, where, clasping her children to her heart, his
devoted wife knelt watching them, her fond lips moving in ceaseless
prayer. Dimly she could see the tried leader, her soldier husband,
sitting in saddle at the bank. Bravely she answered the flutter of his
handkerchief in farewell. Then all was swallowed up in the shadows of
the distant prairie, and from the nursery adjoining her room there rose
a querulous wail that told that her baby daughter was waking,
indifferent to the need that sent the soldier father to the aid of
distant comrades, threatened by a merciless foe, and conscious only of
her infantile demands and expectations. Not yet ten years wed, that
brave, devoted wife and mother had known but two summers that had not
torn her husband from her side on just such quest and duty, for these
were the days of the building up of the West, resisted to the bitter
end by the red wards of the nation.
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