Scatter'd an' shunder'd.
Then they rode back, but not----"

The boy's voice wavered. Uncle Arthur saw him put up a thin hand and
wipe his white little brow. Major David's plays were always intensely
real to him.

"_Not--the six hundred_," he murmured, and sank down on the window-seat,
gazing mournfully out over the square. But in a moment he was up again.

"Cannon to right of 'em," he began again, sternly. "Cannon to left of
'em----"

Uncle Arthur crept away without bidding him remember his promise. What
is a Memorial Day address beside the charge of a Light Brigade?

It was only two days after this that David's mother summoned David's
four uncles to a conference. David had no father. There was a granite
boulder up in the cemetery which ever since David was four years old--he
was ten now--had been draped once a year with a beautiful silken flag.
All the Thorndyke men had been soldiers, and David's father had died at
the front, where the Thorndyke men usually died. It was a matter of
great pride to David every year--that silken flag.

David's four uncles were all soldiers--in a way. There was Uncle
Chester; he had been breveted colonel at the close of the Civil War,
and Colonel Thorndyke he was--against his will--always called still.
Next came Uncle Stephen; he was a captain of artillery in the regular
army, and had lately come home on a furlough, after three years' service
in the Philippines. Then there was Uncle Stuart, just getting strong
after an attack of typhoid fever. In a week he would be back at West
Point, where he was a first classman and a cadet lieutenant. As for
Uncle Arthur, David always regretted deeply that he was no longer in
either volunteer or regular army, although he took some comfort from the
fact that Uncle Arthur sometimes told him that he had never felt more
like a soldier than he did now.

It was a hasty and a serious conference, this to which Mrs. Roger
Thorndyke had summoned her dead husband's three brothers and his uncle.
She felt the need of all their counsel, for she had a grave question to
settle. She was a young woman with a sweet decisiveness of character all
her own, yet when a woman has four men upon whom she can call for wisdom
to support her own judgment, she would be an unwise person to ignore
that fact.

"It's just this," she told them, when she had closed the door of
Arthur's study, where they had assembled. "You know how long we've been
hoping something coul