“He didn’t make it,” Powell answered.
“He didn’t? Did he inherit it?”
“No.”
“Then how did he get it?”
“He gathered it.”
“Gathered it? I don’t know what you mean.”
Powell laughed.
“You don’t? Well, there’s a difference.”
“He wasn’t in the army, was he?”
“In the army! Great God!” Powell threw into his voice the contempt he could not find the word to express. “You think he’d risk his hide in the army? Well, I should say not! Though he would have been perfectly safe—” Powell said it as a parenthetical afterthought—“no bullet could ever have pierced his hide, and he had no blood to shed.”