“Milo, sir. Milo Potter.”
“Milo, did you ever hear the story about the farmer out in Illinois, where I was raised? Well, this fellow he was a good farmer and a dutiful son to his mother but he got up towards forty years old and he’d never married a wife. So his mother fretted at him, said she was getting too old to churn and milk and he ought to fetch a wife home to take some of the work off of her. So this farmer, call him Jim, he goes down to the church and hunts up the preacher. ‘Preacher’, says Jim ‘I got to get married. Mammy says so.’ ‘All right, Jim,’ agrees the preacher, ‘I’ll be proud to marry you. You go get your license and bring the woman here with you and I’ll give you a real good marrying.’ ‘But I haven’t got any woman, Preacher,’ Jim argues kind of dashed. ‘Well, you can’t get married without a woman, Jim’, the preacher tells him. That’s your problem, Milo. You want to be a captain and you haven’t got any organization to captain. What made you think you could be a captain, anyway?”
“Well, Mr. President,” the boy flushed unhappily, “it was that captain we got in B Company. That last battle—he made us retreat. And right there in front of us there was a hole in that Rebel line I could have drove four wagons through. There wasn’t no sense in that retreat, Mr. President. All of us boys said so. All of us was mad. So I thought I can be a better captain than that.”
“Maybe you can, Milo. You go on back to B Company and be a good soldier and likely you’ll make captain before this war is over.”
“Mr. President, I can’t do it! I run off. They’ll put me in the guardhouse!”
Lincoln scratched his chin. “That was very unwise of you, soldier. But you can’t dodge your military responsibility. I reckon you’ll just have to go to the guardhouse. If you should try to hedge out of it you’d be as poor a soldier as that captain of B Company you complain about. It won’t be too bad. Good luck to you, son.”
The boy said, “Thank you, sir,” and backed out, twisting his cap in his hands.
“Stand up straight, look the captain in the eye, and admit you ran off, son,” advised Lincoln. “You needn’t tell him you came here to get his job away from him.”
“No, sir, I sure won’t.”
John Hay came in when the young trooper had gone. “I shouldn’t have let him in perhaps, Mr. President,” he explained, “but he said he had an important message for you.”