"By God, they'll never get their artillery through here.

Mark it, all the same," he added indifferently, and seated himself beside me, dropping his rifle across his knees with a gesture of weariness.
"Are you tired ?" I asked.
He looked up at me with a wan smile.
"Weary of myself, Loskiel, and of a life lived too lightly and now nigh ended." "Nigh ended!" I repeated.
"I go not back again," he said, sombrely.
I glanced sharply at him, where he sat brooding over his rifle; and there was in his face an expression such as I had never before seen there--something unnatural that altered him altogether, as death alters the features, leaving them strangely unfamiliar.

And even as I looked, the expression passed.

He lifted his eyes to mine, and even smiled.
"There is," he said, "a viewless farm which companions even the swiftest on the last long trail, a phantom-pilot which leads only toward that Shadowed Valley of endless rest.

In my ears all day--close, close to my ear, I have heard the whisper of this unseen ghost--everywhere I have heard it, amid the din of the artillery, on windy hill-tops, in the long silence of the forest, through the noise of torrents in lost ravines, by flowing rivers sparkling in the sun--everywhere my pilot whispers to me.