Mother was silent for a minute, and even seated herself, but presently she sprang to her feet again and made for the door
The soldier's wife seized her by an arm
"Where are you going? To the Sands? Are you crazy? If you start a quarrel over there you'll never come back alive."
"I don't care!"
She wrenched herself free and left the room.
Half an hour later she came back beaming
"His father is a lovely Gentile," she said. "He went out, brought his murderer of a boy home, took off his belt, and skinned him alive."
"A good Gentile," the soldier's wife commented, admiringly
There was always a pile of logs somewhere in our Court, the property of some family that was to have it cut up for firewood. This was our great gathering-place of a summer evening. Here we would bandy stories (often of our own inventing) or discuss things, the leading topic of conversation being the soldiers of the two regiments that were stationed in our town. We saw a good deal of these soldiers, and we could tell their officers, commissioned or non-commissioned, by the number of stars or bands on their shoulder-straps. Also, we knew the names of their generals, colonels, and some of their majors or captains. The more important manoeuvers took place a great distance from Abner's Court, but that did not matter. If they occurred on a Saturday, when we were free from school—and, as good luck would have it, they usually did—many of us, myself invariably included, would go to see them. The blare of trumpets, the beat of drums, the playing of the band, the rhythmic clatter of thousands of feet, the glint of rows and rows of bayonets, the red or the blue of the uniforms, the commanding officer on his mount, the spirited singing of the men marching back to barracks—all this would literally hold me spellbound
That we often played soldiers goes without saying, but we played "hares" more often, a game in which the counting was done by means of senseless words like the American "Eeny, meeny, miny, moe." Sometimes we would play war, with the names of the belligerents borrowed from the Old Testament, and once in a while we would have a real "war" with the boys of the next street