PAINTED ROCK
The Colonel whispered to me without turning—
"I never reckoned on this, Charlie."
There was something that no one could have reckoned on in the men before us. Both of us had seen death in strange and horrible shapes. The old Colonel had slept among the piled dead of many awful fields. And I had seen sudden death too, and murdered men whose slayers none discovered, and death by disease more dreadful than death by knife or bullet. But neither of us had ever seen two such men fight merely with their eyes, with their intent minds, with their very souls. It seemed to me that both forgot that they were armed, that they carried lethal weapons. Here was one who said he was afraid; and the other said that he was afraid. And they struggled strangely with their own discovered weakness, and their nerves were strung and trembled until it seemed to us who looked on that we could hear the sound of our own hearts and theirs.
I was sorry for them, and almost grieved to see them come to this test. A strange
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