“I asked you to tell my why he enlisted.”
“The trouble is, I don't think I can tell that to anybody who needs an answer. He just went, of course. There isn't any question about it. I always thought he'd be the first to go.”
“Oh, no!” she said.
“Yes, I always thought so.”
“I think you were mistaken,” she said, decidedly. “It was a special reason—to make him act so cruelly.”
“Cruelly!” Fred cried.
“It was!”
“Cruel to whom?”
“Oh, to his mother—to his family. To have him go off that way, without a word—”
“Oh, no' he'd been home,” Fred corrected her. “He went home the Saturday before he enlisted, and settled it with them. They're all broken up, of course; but when they saw he'd made up his mind, they quit opposing him, and I think they're proud of him about it, maybe, in spite of feeling anxious. You see, his father was an artilleryman in the war with Spain, and his grandfather was a Colonel at the end of the War of the Rebellion, though he went into it as a private, like Ramsey. He died when Ramsey was about twelve; but Ramsey remembers him; he was talking of him a little the night before he enlisted.”