ind me, I put a man's
best energy into the thing before me.

The battle-field alone is not the soldier's greatest test. I had kept
step with men who charge an enemy on an open plain or storm a high
defense in the face of sure defeat. I had been ordered with my company
to take redoubts against the flaming throats of bellowing cannon in the
life-and-death grip before Richmond. I had felt the awful thrill of
carnage as my division surged back and forth across the blood-soaked
lengths of Gettysburg, and I never once fell behind my comrades. The
battle-field breeds courage, and self-forgetfulness, and exaltation,
from the sense of duty squarely met.

There were no battle-fields in 1867, where Greek met Greek in splendid
gallantry, out on the Kansas plains. Over Fort Harker hung the pall of
death, and in the July heat the great black plague of Asiatic cholera
stalked abroad and scourged the land. Men were dying like rats, lacking
everything that helps to drive death back. The volunteer who had offered
himself to save the settlers from the scalping-knife had come here only
to look into an open grave, and then, in agony, to drop into it. Such
things test soldiers more than battle-fields. And our men turned back in
fear, preferring the deserter's shame to quick, inglorious martyrdom by
Asiatic cholera. I had a battle of my own the first night at Fort
Harker. There was a growing moon and the night breeze was cool after the
heat of the day. Beverly Clarenden and I went down to the river, whose
tawny waters hardly hid the tawny sands beneath them. The plains were
silent, but from all the hospital tents about the fort came the sharp,
agonized cries of pain that forerun the last collapse of the
plague-stricken sufferers. To get away from the sound of it all we
wandered down the stream to where the banks of soft, caving earth on the
farther side were higher than a man's head, and their shadow hid the
current. We sat down and stared silently at the waters, scarcely
whispering as they rolled along, and at the still shade of the farther
bank upon them. The shadows thickened and moved a little, then grew
still. We also grew still. Then they moved again just opposite us, and
fell into three parts, as three men glided silently along under the
bank's protecting gloom. We waited until they had reached the edge of
the moonlight, and saw three soldiers pass swiftly out across the
unprotected sands to other shadowy places further on.

"Desert