"Let them try it!" thundered Eugene, with a full breath from the big bellows in his broad chest. "Hugo, I don't like to hear you talk that way," he added, shaking his head sadly. Such views from a friend really hurt him; indeed, he was almost lugubrious. This brought another laugh.
"Don't you see he's getting you, Gene?"
"He's acting!"
"He always gets you, you old simpleton!" The judge's son gave Eugene an affectionate dig in the ribs.
Eugene was well liked and in the way that a big Saint Bernard dog is liked. At the latest man[oe]uvres, on the night that their division had made a rapid flank movement, without any apparent sense that his own load was the heavier for it, he had carried the rifle and pack of Peter Kinderling, a valet's pasty-faced little son "Peterkin," as he was called, was the stupid of Company B. Being generally inoffensive, the butt of the drill sergeant, who thought that he would never learn even the manual of arms, and rounding out the variety of characters which makes for fellowship, he was regarded with a sympathetic kindliness by his comrades.
"But I don't think you ought to joke about the flag That's sacred!" declared Eugene.
"Now you're talking!" said Jacob Pilzer, the butcher's son, who sat on the other side of the bench from Eugene. He was heavily built, with an undershot jaw and a patch of liverish birthmark on his cheek.
"Yes," piped Peterkin, who had an opinion when the two strong men of the company agreed on any subject. But he spoke tentatively, nevertheless. He was taking no risks.
"Oh, if we went to war the Bodlapoo affair would be only an excuse," said the manufacturer's son. "We shall go to war as a matter of broad national policy."
"Right you are!" agreed the banker's son. "No emotion about it. Emotion as an international quantity is dead. Everything is business now in this business age."