Trooper Tales — page 97: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Two Women and a Soldier. 87 In the deep shadow of an unused building, on the even- ing before the cavalrymen left for the front, there came to the daughter of Venning’s troop commander a sorrow deep and lasting. The captain was at the officers’ club-rooms with the other commissioned men. The barracks was brilliantly lighted, and from its open windows Venning and the maiden could hear the songs of the soldiers. The night before men leave for the front they are always merry— as an aeronaut is before swinging off—because crowds are watching. The cavalryman and captain’s daughter stood together at the wall of an old deserted barracks. Above them a great tree whispered and sighed. The man was vaguely conscious of the silent suffering in the dark eyes of the girl—of her face which was white with pain. He was conscious, too, of the moveless chill which filled his breast; but, more than all, he felt a moral strength in his brain which was strange and new. In the branches above them there was a music, low and mournful. : “Little girl,’ said the trooper, “I do not know what has come over me. Somehow, I am a different fellow to-night. If I had felt like this before I would never have been a cavalryman, because I could have done no wrong. . . . There, there, Nellie. I do not mean to grieve you through any stories of those other days. I never thought I could hate myself so intensely for them! “I feel too black, little girl, to be near you to-night. Gcomichooks (EO)