Yet under this imperturbable mask he was keenly conscious of everything;
in that apparent concentration there was a sharpening of all his senses
and his impressibility: he saw the first trace of doubt or alarm in the
face of a subaltern to whom he was giving an order; the first touch of
sluggishness in a re-forming line; the more significant clumsiness of
a living evolution that he knew was clogged by the dead bodies of
comrades; the ominous silence of a breastwork; the awful inertia of some
rigidly kneeling files beyond, which still kept their form but never
would move again; the melting away of skirmish points; the sudden gaps
here and there; the sickening incurving of what a moment before had been
a straight line--all these he saw in all their fatal significance. But
even at this moment, coming upon a hasty barricade of overset commissary
wagons, he stopped to glance at a familiar figure he had seen but
an hour ago, who now seemed to be commanding a group of collected
stragglers and camp followers. Mounted on a wheel, with a revolver in
each hand and a bowie knife between his teeth--theatrical even in his
paroxysm of undoubted courage--glared Jim Hooker. And Clarence Brant,
with the whole responsibility of the field on his shoulders, even at
that desperate moment, found himself recalling a vivid picture of the
actor Hooker personating the character of "Red Dick" in "Rosalie, the
Prairie Flower," as he had seen him in a California theatre five years
before.
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