“Doesn’t the cook give you pie once in a while?”
“Pie?” shouted Big McConnell. “Well, I guess not. I wish you could photograph the slush we had for dinner. You would need an orthochromatic plate and a microscopic lens.”
“Did you finish the box mother sent down?” asked Little McConnell.
“Finish it?” His brother looked down in dramatic disdain. “Young fellow, I was eating the nails in the cover before eleven o’clock the next day.”
“I wonder what makes you so hungry?” said Little McConnell.
The Corporal pointed across the field where the second battalion was drilling. “That, for one thing. Did you ever stop to think how heavy a musket is, and how many times its weight doubles in an hour’s drill?”
Across the company street Corporal Dacey was showing his cousin Cora how to hold a musket, and they all laughed at Cora’s brave attempt to ignore the weight of the weapon.
“How to hold a musket.”
Over by the Y. M. C. A. tent Big McConnell found the pie-woman, and they all went to work on pie of various denominations.