The postscript philosopher replied: “I never saw you show any fear, Joe.”
“That’s because I’m too big a coward to show it,” said Joe.
Even the two reticent mountaineers understood that.
One of them was moved to break the silence. At last he had, if not a thought, yet an emotion to stand sponsor for utterance.
“I always feel,” said he, “as though the squegees had took hold of my knees. There ain’t anything of me for about a minute—exceptin’ a spot in the small of my back. I always wish I was a woman or a baby, or dead or something like that. After a while I git holt of myself and I says to myself, ‘Bill, you’ve got to stand up to the rack, fodder or no fodder.’ After that it all comes sort of easy like, you know, because the firin’ begins, and after the firin’ begins you’re doin’ somethin’, you see, and when you’re fightin’ like, things don’t seem so bad. I s’pose you’ve all noticed that.”
From Joe: “In all the works on psychology it has been recognized as a universal principle, that the mind when occupied with a superior consideration is able to free itself from considerations of a lesser sort.”
The mountaineer looked at him helplessly and said nothing.
The postscript philosopher began: “I shall never forget my first battle. It wasn’t much of a battle either, but it was lively while it lasted. Unfortunately for me it was one of those fights where you have to wait for the enemy to begin. I was tender then. I had just left home, and every time I looked at the little knickknacks mother and the girls had given me to make camp life comfortable,—for bless my soul they thought we lived in camp,—every time I looked at these things I grew teary. There oughtn’t to be any bric-à-brac of that kind given to a fellow when he goes into the army. It isn’t fit. It worries him.”
He was silent for a minute. So were the rest of us. We all had bric-à-brac to remember. He resumed:
“We were lying there in the edge of a piece of woods with a sloping meadow in front, crossed by a stone wall heavily overgrown with vines. At the other edge of the meadow was another strip of woods. The enemy were somewhere in there. We knew they were coming, because the pickets had been driven in, and we stood there waiting for them. The waiting was the worst of it, and as we waited I got to feeling in my pockets and—pulled out a little, old three-cornered pincushion. Conscience knows I wouldn’t have pulled out that pincushion at that particular minute to have won a battle. I’ve got it now. I never had any use for a pincushion because I never could pin any two things together the way a woman can, but a man can’t make his womenkind believe that: I’ve kept it all through the war, and when I go back home—if it suits the Yankees that I ever go back at all—I’m going to give it as a souvenir to the little sister that made it for me. And I’m going to tell her that it was that pincushion, little three-cornered thing that it is, that made a man out of me that day.