Page:McClure's Magazine volume 10.djvu/437

Rh Jonathan would not approve of it. He was afraid of Jonathan. But whole days slipped by when he was not strong enough to work, and yet he clung to the task with feverish eagerness. The man within him protested that he was still good for something, that old age had not robbed him of everything.

On the morning of Memorial Day the whittling was all finished, but there remained the task of attaching the straps, and Uncle Luther knew that he could not hope to complete the leg in time for the exercises. So he laid it away, and toward noon he dressed up in his best blue clothes, and put on his wide-brimmed black hat with the gold cord around the crown. Then he hobbled out of the door, and dropped down on a box by the fence, with his back resting against a post. It was a fresh, clear May morning. During the night there had been a shower, and the grass at the roadside stood up green and dewy. The fields of waving wheat-blades spread away for miles before him, dotted here and there with houses and red barns, and straight rows of Lombardy poplars and cottonwoods. Where Uncle Luther sat he could look up the yellow stretch of roadway, and he knew that he could see the parade almost as soon as it left the town. It would pass the end of the lane on its way to the cemetery, and he hoped, with the vague optimism of the very old and the very young, that it would come back by the same road. Seeing it was next to marching with it.

Uncle Luther put on his long-distance glasses, and he saw a blur of blue moving along the road from the village. Above it there was a blur of red and white. A moment later they resolved themselves into a knot of old soldiers, with the flag flapping above them. Uncle Luther took a long breath, and his eyes shone. Suddenly a band began to play the stirring music of "Marching through Georgia."

"They've got the band," exclaimed Uncle Luther, in a voice that choked with ecstasy.

Unconsciously he rose on his one good foot and took off his hat. His eyes dimmed, and as the enlivening strains of the music came up to him, another picture formed on his misty glasses. He saw the boys in blue—not a meager handful of gray and stooping remnants, but boys, with fresh young faces, and broad shoulders, and proud chins. They were muddy to the knees with marching, they were ragged and tattered, but they swept by to the drums and fifes, regiment after regiment and brigade after brigade;

and orderlies clattered up and down with yellow envelopes stuck in their belts; and the shells were screeching from the rebel heights. He saw the companies wheel and deploy; he saw them strip down and form in line at "Charge bayonets." The big, black guns were leaping the ruts in the road, with the gunners clinging desperately to the caissons. Then he saw the long line of gray rise up over the hill, and pour itself down the slope. He saw the ragged, mile long flash of the carbines—and he would have leaped forward to the charge, if for a single moment he had heard the bugle's shrill summons.

Uncle Luther's spectacles were dimmed. He polished them off with shaky fingers, and looked again. Behind the band there was a stretch of white that seemed to nod and twinkle in the sunshine.

"They've got the children, too," he faltered.

Then the old fellows in blue swung at the corner; they were keeping military line, and something of the old spirit had thrilled their steps into an unwonted precision. The band, wheeling with them, swept into "Rally Round the Flag, Boys." Uncle Luther leaped forward on his one good leg, waved his hat around his head, and shouted, "Hurrah, hurrah! " His head was thrown back, his eyes flashed, his breath came quick and hot.

"Down with the traitor, up with the star," he chanted in his thin, quavery old voice.

Now they had reached the end of the