The sun went down at twenty-two minutes to five, and the retreat gun went off from the bluff with a flat heavy slam that came back off the hills across the river like a door closing in another house. The band played. The garrison flag came down the staff in short jerks, the companies of the Eleventh stood at present arms, and across the parade the troop of the Second sat their horses with their breath going up gray. In the quiet after the gun Larrabee could hear the mules in the corral shaking their harness, and somebody's child crying in the officers' row, and the river.
He had spoken to Donnellan in the stables in four sentences. Terence Donnellan was a Kerryman of forty who had come to America in the famine ships as a child and joined the army at Fort Riley in 1858 and had fought in the Second Dragoons at Gaines's Mill and in the Second Cavalry ever since, and he had never in Larrabee's knowledge needed anything said to him twice.
"We're going out with the train," Larrabee had said. "You'll command the escort till I join you. I'm going to ride the telegraph north with Stays With the Horses and a signalman and find out why the line went down, and I'll come back to you before morning. Camp on the high bench above Sage Hen Creek, not in the bottom, corral the wagons and put the horses inside the corral on a double picket, and no fires near the wagons, and nobody, nobody, goes near the third wagon from the end but you and a man you trust. Watch Kimbrough. If anything happens in the night, anything at all, the wagons can burn, but you keep the men alive."
Donnellan had looked at him for perhaps two seconds.
"The wagons can burn," he had said. "Yes, sir. And Kimbrough? If he wants to know where the lieutenant's gone?"
"Tell him I went back to the post to get the repeat of the order off the wire. Tell him I'm a fussy young gentleman who likes his paper in order. Tell him I swore about it."
"Did you swear about it, sir?"
"I'm about to," Larrabee had said.
Now he sat his horse at the head of the troop and watched the flag come down, and when it was folded he turned in the saddle and found Philo Gaskell on the porch of the adjutant's office, in the long dark blue cavalry cape, and beside him, with a gray shawl over her head and one hand on his arm, Sallie Gaskell. She was looking at her husband. Gaskell was looking at Larrabee.