his hereditary instinct in his conflicts with his school-fellows. And it
was a part of this inconsistency that, riding away from the scene of his
first bloodshed, his eyes were dimmed with moisture, not for his victim,
but for the one being who he believed had impelled him to the act.
This and more was in his mind during his long ride to Fair Plains, his
journey by coach to the Embarcadero, his midnight passage across the
dark waters of the bay, and his re-entrance to San Francisco, but what
should be his future was still unsettled.
As he wound round the crest of Russian Hill and looked down again upon
the awakened city, he was startled to see that it was fluttering and
streaming with bunting. From every public building and hotel, from
the roofs of private houses, and even the windows of lonely dwellings,
flapped and waved the striped and starry banner. The steady breath of
the sea carried it out from masts and yards of ships at their wharves,
from the battlements of the forts Alcatraz and Yerba Bueno. He
remembered that the ferryman had told him that the news from Fort Sumter
had swept the city with a revulsion of patriotic sentiment, and that
there was no doubt that the State was saved to the Union. He looked
down upon it with haggard, bewildered eyes, and then a strange gasp
and fullness of the throat! For afar a solitary bugle had blown the
"reveille" at Fort Alcatraz.
PART II.
CHAPTER I.
Night at last, and the stir and tumult of a great fight over. Even the
excitement that had swept this portion of the battlefield--only a small
section of a vaster area of struggle--into which a brigade had marched,
held its own, been beaten back, recovered its ground, and pursuing,
had passed out of it forever, leaving only its dead behind, and knowing
nothing more of that struggle than its own impact and momentum--even
this wild excitement had long since evaporated with the stinging smoke
of gunpowder, the acrid smell of burning rags from the clothing of a
dead soldier fired by a bursting shell, or the heated reek of sweat and
|