They rushed to the door and looked where she
pointed.
A man in a blue coat, with a musket on his back, was toiling
slowly up the hill, on the sun-bright, dusty road, toiling slowly,
with bent head half-hidden by a heavy knapsack. So tired it
seemed that walking was indeed a process of falling. So eager to
get home he would not stop, would not look aside, but plodded on,
amid the cries of the locusts, the welcome of the crickets, and the
rustle of the yellow wheat. Getting back to God's country, and his
wife and babies!
Laughing, crying, trying to call him and the children at the same
time, the little wife, almost hysterical, snatched her hat and ran out
into the yard. But the soldier had disappeared over the hill into the
hollowy beyond, and, by the time she had found the children, he
was too far away for her voice to reach him. And besides, she was
not sure it was her husband, for he had not turned his head at their
shouts. This seemed so strange. Why didn't he stop to rest at his
old neighbor's house? Tortured by hope and doubt, she hurried up
the coulee as fast as she could push the baby wagon, the blue
coated figure just ahead pushing steadily, silently forward up the
coulee.
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