"Humph," said the woman. "He's run acrost Stevenson's old boar, that runs in them woods up thar, and is mouty savage this time o' year. He'd take a laig offen a youngster quicker'n scat, if he ketched him. He done well to run."
"They have got a job ahead of 'em," remarked Shorty, looking in the direction of the fires.
ONE:"O, he was an ornament to the army," continued the unblushing Shorty, who hadn't had a good opportunity to lie in all the weeks that the Deacon had been with him, and wanted to exercise his old talent, to see whether he had lost it. "And the handsomest man! There wasn't a finer-looking man in the whole army. The Colonel used to get awfully jealous o' him, because everybody that'd come into camp 'd mistake him for the Colonel. He'd 'a' bin Colonel, too, if he'd only lived. But the poor fellow broke his heart. He fell in love with a girl somewhere up NorthPewter Hatchet, or some place like that. I never saw her, and don't know nothin' about her, but I heard that the boys from her place said that she was no match for him. She was only plain, ordinary-lookin'."And so he had turned off the pain, and, with it, everything else.
CHAPTER XVII. IN THE HOSPITAL Elliott will take Harney's."I'm afraid there's no use of picking up Corp'l Klegg and Shorty," said the Lieutenant, with tears in his eyes. "They got the rebel flag, but they're lying there stiff and cold."The 200th Ind. moved forward and took its place in the line on a hill commanding a view of the entrance to the gorge, and there waited its orders for the general advance, which seemed imminent any instant.Never before, in all his countless millions of journeys around the globe, had he seen a human force of such tremendous aggressive power concentrated on such a narrow space. He may have seen larger armiesthough not manybut he had never seen 100,000 such veterans as thoseoriginally of as fine raw material as ever gathered under a banner, and trained to war by nearly three years of as arduous schooling as men ever knew, which sifted out the weaklings, the incompetents, the feeblewilled by the boisterous winnowing of bitter war.
