But the Captain would not budge. Commies and glassies crashed around him. They ploughed up the earthworks before him; they did great execution on the legs of chairs and tables and other non-combatants behind. Yet there he stood, unmoved in the midst of the carnage, his heels together, his little fingers just touching the seams of his pantaloons. It was for all the world as though he were on dress parade. Perhaps he was—for while he stood there, valorous in that Christmas fight, his eyes were on the heights of Rocking Chair beyond, where, safe from the marble hail, sat the Rag Doll with Lizbeth and the waxen blonde. There was a rumble—a crash through the torn earthworks—a shock—a scream from the distant heights—and the Captain fell. A monstrous glassy had struck him fairly in the legs, and owing to his military habit of standing with them close together—well, it was all too sad, too harrowing, to relate. An ambulance corps of Grandfather and Uncle Ned carried the crippled soldier to the Tool Chest Hospital. He was just conscious, that was all. The operation he bore with great fortitude, refusing to take chloroform, and insisting on dying with his musket beside him, if die he must. What seemed to give him greatest anguish was his heels, for, separated at last, they would not click together now; and his little fingers groped nervously for the misplaced seams of his pantaloons. Long afterwards, when the Captain had left his cot for active duty again, it was recalled that the very moment when he fell so gallantly in the trenches that day a lady was found unconscious, flat on her face, at the foot of Rocking Chair Hill. Captain Jinks was never the same after that. Still holding his gun as smartly as before, there was, on the other hand, a certain carelessness of attire, a certain dulness of gilt buttons, a smudginess of scarlet coat, as though it were thumb-marked; and dark clouds were beginning to lower in the clear azure of his pantaloons. There was, withal, a certain rakishness of bearing not provided for in the regulations; a little uncertainty as to legs; a tilt and limp, as it were, in sharp contrast to the trim soldier who had guarded the commissary chocolates under the Christmas fir. Moreover—though his comrades at arms forbore to mention it, loving him for his gallant service—he was found one night, flat on his face, under the dinner-table. Now the Captain had always been abstemious before. Liquor of any kind he had shunned as poison, holding that it spotted his uniform; and once when forced to drink from Lizbeth’s silver cup, at the end of a dusty march, his lips paled at the contaminating touch, his red cheeks blanched, and his black mustache, in a single drink, turned gray. But here he lay beneath the festive board, bedraggled, his nose buried in the soft rug, hopelessly inarticulate—though the last symptom was least to be wondered at, since he had always been a silent man.