The instinct of generosity, the instinct of self-sacrifice, moved
him now as, long ago one fatal night, they had moved him to bear the sin
of his mother's darling as his own.
Full remembrance, full consideration of what he had done, never came to
him as he dashed on across the many leagues that still lay between
him and his goal. His one impulse had been to spare the other from the
knowledge that he lived; his one longing was to have the hardness and
the bitterness of his own life buried in the oblivion of a soldier's
grave.
Within six-and-thirty hours the instructions he bore were in the tent of
the Chef du Bataillon whom they were to direct, and he himself returned
to the caravanserai to fulfill with his own hand to the dead those last
offices which he would delegate to none. It was night when he arrived;
all was still and deserted. He inquired if the party of tourists was
gone; they answered him in the affirmative; there only remained the
detachment of the French infantry, which were billeted there for a
while.
It was in the coolness and the hush of the night, with the great stars
shining clearly over the darkness of the plains, that they made the
single grave, under a leaning shelf of rock, with the somber fans of a
pine spread above it, and nothing near but the sleeping herds of goats.
The sullen echo of the soldiers' muskets gave its only funeral requiem;
and the young lambs and kids in many a future spring-time would come and
play, and browse, and stretch their little, tired limbs upon its sod,
its sole watchers in the desolation of the plains.
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