“I—I s’pose mother has a right to do whatever she likes with letters that come to our house,” he mumbled. “It’s her house, you know. And after she left—well, I wasn’t there either.”
“Yes. Yes. It’s all right. No one’s to blame. Go on.”
“Two fellers on our block, only a year older’n I was, went away to Columbus to enlist,” pursued Jimmie. “They were pretty big. And they swore they were eighteen. So they got accepted. That was too much for me. Nobody needed me at Uncle Cyrus’s. And I missed you such a lot. And all the time I could hear the war whispering and calling to me the way you said it always does to men who love their country. So—I ran away to Columbus, the way the other fellers had, too.”
“Yes? But you weren’t even fifteen yet, let alone eighteen. How could—”
“That was the trouble. The recruiting sergeant sized me up the minute he set eyes on me—for all I’d stuffed hay in my shoes to make me taller and walked on my toes. But he got a bounty for all the fellers he put through, so he just shoved the Bible at me and told me to put my hand on it and say I was eighteen and it would be all right. And—and—I couldn’t.”
“Of course not, Jimmie,” assented Dad softly. “We’re the fighting Brintons. Not the perjuring Brintons. It’s a terrible thing at best to have to lay your hand on the Book and swear to anything. But when there’s any shadow of doubt about the truth of the thing you swear to—why, a real man can’t.”
“How about the two other fellers? Aren’t they guilty of—”
“‘Guilty’s’ a pretty big word for anybody except God to use. What happened next?”
“I had eighteen dollars in my window-bank. I bought a second-hand uniform, cut it down myself, and then bought a second-hand drum. And I lit out for the Mississippi, where I heard some of the Ohio regiments were fighting. I had a kind of hope I’d find you.
“I got to a place where our men were trying to storm a battery. I—I couldn’t wait, the way I meant to, to ask some drum major to take me on as drummer-boy. First thing I knew I was in front of our line, banging the drum and telling the men to come on. And—they came.”