He had so many things to tell them that he forgot how weary he was. Now that his danger was over, he had no need of minimizing for his mother’s sake the discomforts he had been suffering. He said feelingly what he thought of a government that couldn’t get letters from a soldier’s home in Iowa to a military hospital in New Orleans. He shouldn’t have minded the fever so much if he could have heard from home, and if he had been stronger he would likely have been more sensible about not getting letters. It seemed to him he had been confined in a madhouse devised for his torture. He would have preferred a battle months long to those endless, helpless, sick-minded days. And now he never wanted to speak of that time or hear of it again as long as he lived.
Young Peter had torn his coat half off his back at play that day, and it must be mended before schooltime next morning. It was a piece of patching not long or difficult, but his mother laid it down to look at her Wully—she laid it down and took it again a dozen times before it was done. She couldn’t deny her eyes the sight of his white, thin, beautiful face. He ought to go to bed. She could see that. She urged him to again and again, as they sat around the stove. But he had always one more thing to tell as he started to go. He had never written in full about getting back to his regiment after his last visit home, had he? Well, when he got back, there was not an officer left whom he had known. And the one to whom he had to tell his tale of escaping from his guard—oh, he was a new man, most hated by the boys—he had put Wully and two others in prison in the loft of a barn, on bread and water. And every night the guard, who knew them, used to hand up on the end of bayonets all the food they could desire. And the officer heard of it, and was more angry. He was a man who raged. And he changed the guard, and yet the men who hated his being there, in place of the colonel they had liked, Wully’s friends, managed some way to feed the prisoners, so that really in the loft they had nothing to do but to sleep well-fed, and rest. And presently the new colonel waxed more raging and swearing, and sent the three away to another place to be disciplined, sent them—guess where, of all places—to Colonel Ingersoll for punishment!
“What? Not that infidel!”
Yes, exactly, and that was just how Wully had felt about it! The prisoners made Wully their spokesman in the first hearing. Colonel Ingersoll listened to them kindly till he had finished speaking. He had a boil on the back of his neck and was not able to turn his head, and he sat there, just looking at Wully, a long time, too long, Wully began to fear. And then he said:
“I wouldn’t punish you if you were my man, McLaughlin. And I don’t see why I should because you aren’t.” And he called an orderly and told him to take the men to a mess.
“Ingersoll did that? That infidel?”
“Yes.”
His mother was leaning forward, Peter’s coat forgotten.
“Yon’s a grand man,” she cried with conviction.
“He’s an infidel,” her husband reminded her.
“He’s a grand man for a’ that!” she asserted.
“But he’s an infidel!”
“He’s a grand man, I’m telling you, for a’ that!” After that, every time she sang the Antichrist’s praise to her neighbors she had the last word of characterization. (After all, her family had not been Covenanters.) Presently she laid the coat down again—the children were in bed now, and Wully, too, with only his father and mother beside him in the kitchen.
“Your father told you about Jeannie’s death, Wully?” His father had told him briefly about it on the way home. He didn’t say to his mother that the news had thrilled him with the certainty that now his plans could have no opposition, since Chirstie was left quite unprotected, and must be needing him. He was ashamed of the hope he had had from it, when he saw his mother’s face harden with grief and resentment as she went on to relate the details of her friend’s death, a death grim enough to be in keeping with Jeannie’s life. For her part, she hoped to live till Alex McNair got home, till she could get one good chance to tell him what she thought of him! Oh, it had been altogether a terrible winter, almost as bad as that worst early one, just one fierce-driven blizzard after another. Jeannie had known in that darkening afternoon that it was no common illness coming over her. Chirstie, terrified by her isolation, had begged to be allowed at once to go for her aunt. But even then so thick was the storm raging that from the window she could not see the barn, and to venture out into the storm could mean only death. As the night had hurled itself upon the poor little shelter, almost hidden under drifts, and the maniac wind unchecked by a tree, unhindered
