The Indianians have
been returning from the summit all day, straggling along in squads of from
three to a full company.
The men are tired,
and the camp is quiet as a house. Six thousand are sleeping away a small
portion of their three weary years of military service. This TIME stretches out
before them, a broad, unknown, and extra-hazardous sea, with promise of some
smooth sailing, but many days and nights of heavy winds and waves, in which
some—how many!— will be carried down.
Their thoughts have
now forced the sentinel lines, leaped the mountains, jumped the rivers,
hastened home, and are lingering about the old fireside, looking in at the
cupboard, and hovering over faces and places that have been growing dearer to
them every day for the last five months. Old-fashioned places, tame and
uninteresting then, but now how loved! And as for the faces, they are those of
mothers, wives, and sweethearts, around which are entwined the tenderest of
memories. But at daybreak, when reveille is sounded, these wanderers must come
trooping back again in time for "hard-tack" and double quick.
SOURCE: John
Beatty, The Citizen-soldier: Or, Memoirs of a Volunteer, p. 74
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