What she dreaded came.
Midway in her course, when, by the stars, she knew midnight was passed,
the animal strained with hard-drawn, panting gasps to answer the demand
made on him by the spur and by the lance-shaft with which he was goaded
onward. In the lantern light she saw his head stretched out in the
racing agony, his distended eyeballs, his neck covered with foam and
blood, his heaving flanks that seemed bursting with every throb that his
heart gave; she knew that, half a league more forced from him, he would
drop like a dead thing never to rise again. She let the bridle drop upon
the poor beast's neck, and threw her arms above her head with a shrill,
wailing cry, whose despair echoed over the noiseless plains like the
cry of a shot-stricken animal. She saw it all: the breaking of the
rosy, golden day; the stillness of the hushed camp; the tread of the
few picked men; the open coffin by the open grave; the leveled carbines
gleaming in the first rays of the sun. . . She had seen it so many
times--seen it to the awful end, when the living man fell down in the
morning light a shattered, senseless, soulless, crushed-out mass.
That single moment was all the soldier's nature in her gave to the
abandonment of despair, to the paralysis that seized her. With that one
cry from the depths of her breaking heart, the weakness spent itself;
she knew that action alone could aid him. She looked across, southward
and northward, east and west, to see if there were aught near from which
she could get aid.
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