"I agree with you," replied Clark. "You have stood by me and the enterprise, like a brave man, and a true comrade, McElroy, and I am glad our business is finished before your duty calls you back to Virginia. You have been my right hand, though all my officers and men have alike acquitted themselves nobly, from first to last."
"With a leader such as we have had, only worthy conduct is possible," I said, my eyes suddenly dim.
"Thank you for that word, McElroy. That worthy men should deem me a worthy leader, is all the praise I ask. And whatever may come between us in the future, comrade, let us not forget that we have stood together in peril and in suffering, have shared risks and dangers in a cause dear to the hearts of both--not even the love of woman should separate comrades such as we have been."
"Nor shall it," I answered earnestly. "God bear me witness, Clark, that I shall feel no malice should Ellen's heart answer to yours. I shall wish you both happiness in all sincerity, and seek solace in my duty."
"No fear, McElroy; you have the sturdiest and best traits of a noble people. I have some of them, doubtless, as my Saxon blood gives me right, but mixed, I fear, with a strain of wildness. I doubt if the anchors of duty are strong enough to hold me to a wise, sane life--unless Ellen's love shall help to weight them. As you have said, comrade, an adventurous, reckless life has strong temptation for me; therefore, if Ellen's love is not for me--and I forebode it is not, though I'm not yet ready to resign all hope--I shall take it for a sign that a kind fate is sparing her the woeful doom of a drunkard's wife." He added, after a brief pause, during which a deep melancholy settled upon his face, "Sometimes a man is doomed from his birth; from the beginning he moves on to a prefixed destiny, and all his struggles to save himself from the end he fears, avail nothing."
My reply combatted Clark's fatalism with all the arguments I could command, but I soon saw that his views on the subject of his destiny were fixed; that with all his cheerful courage, and calculating boldness, there was in his nature that strange vein of superstition or fatalism which has marked so many military heroes:--Hannibal, Alexander, Cæsar, Robert Bruce, Frederick the Great, and others less renowned. Nor can one lay the fatalistic views Clark held to the charge of his religion. Though Scotch-Irish by birth, he knew no more of Presbyterian doctrines than did Father Gibault, and he had no religious principles.