Yet
she had remembrance enough left to ride on, and on, and on without once
flinching from the agonies that racked her cramped limbs and throbbed in
her beating temples; she had remembrance enough to strain her blind eyes
toward the east and murmur, in her terror of that white dawn, that must
soon break, the only prayer that had been ever uttered by the lips no
mother's kiss had ever touched:
"O God! keep the day back!"
CHAPTER XXXVII.
IN THE MIDST OF HER ARMY.
There was a line of light in the eastern sky. The camp was very still.
It was the hour for the mounting of the guard, and, as the light spread
higher and higher, whiter and whiter, as the morning came, a score of
men advanced slowly and in silence to a broad strip of land screened
from the great encampment by the rise and fall of the ground, and
stretching far and even, with only here and there a single palm to
break its surface, over which the immense arc of the sky bent, gray and
serene, with only the one colorless gleam eastward that was changing
imperceptibly into the warm, red flush of opening day.
Sunrise and solitude: they were alike chosen, lest the army that
honored, the comrades that loved him, should rise to his rescue; casting
off the yoke of discipline, and remembering only that tyranny and
that wretchedness under which they had seen him patient and unmoved
throughout so many years of servitude.
He stood tranquil beside the coffin within which his broken limbs and
shot-pierced corpse would so soon be laid forever.
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