a tremor when she was outside the gate, but it came from
excitement and not from fear--the exaltation of spirit would not permit
her to be afraid. She glanced at the forest, but it was only a blur
before her.

The slim, scarlet-clad figure led on. Lucy glanced over her shoulder,
and she saw the women following her in a double file, grave and
resolute. She did not look back again, but marched on straight toward
the spring. She began to feel now what she was doing, that she was
marching into the cannon's mouth, as truly as any soldier that ever led
a forlorn hope against a battery. She knew that hundreds of keen eyes
there in the forest before her were watching her every step, and that
behind her fathers and brothers and husbands were waiting, with an
anxiety that none of them had ever known before.

She expected every moment to hear the sharp whiplike crack of the rifle,
but there was no sound. The fort and all about it seemed to be inclosed
in a deathly stillness. She looked again at the forest, trying to see
the ambushed figures, but again it was only a blur before her, seeming
now and then to float in a kind of mist. Her pulses were beating fast,
she could hear the thump, thump in her temples, but the slim scarlet
figure never wavered and behind, the double file of women followed,
grave and silent.

"They will not fire until we reach the spring," thought Lucy, and now
she could hear the bubble of the cool, clear water, as it gushed from
the hillside. But still nothing stirred in the forest, no rifle cracked,
there was no sound of moving men.

She reached the spring, bent down, filled both buckets at the pool, and
passing in a circle around it, turned her face toward the fort, and,
after her, came the silent procession, each filling her buckets at the
pool, passing around it and turning her face toward the fort as she had
done.

Lucy now felt her greatest fear when she began the return journey and
her back was toward the forest. There was in her something of the
warrior; if the bullet was to find her she preferred to meet it, face to
face. But she would not let her hands tremble, nor would she bend
beneath the weight of the water. She held herself proudly erect and
glanced at the wooden wall before her. It was lined with faces, brown,
usually, but now with the pallor showing through the tan. She saw her
father's among them and she smiled at him, because she was upheld by a
great pride and exultation. It was she w