"Sure!" cried Budd, delighted with his hearer's sympathy. "I'd like to see the sentiment that would hold out after a couple of nights building intrenchments in the rain. How could I help it if when the sentry's back was turned the pick flew out of my hand and clipped him right behind the ear? It was the same cuss who had blocked my game the week before."
"Good!" laughed the professor.
"He dropped," went on the cook, "and that was all I wanted. I lit out and lay around in barns and corn cribs, living on raw carrots and what eggs I found in the straw, till I guessed they must be tired looking for me, and then one morning early I crept out and scared an old black aunty who was feedin' chickens into fits. But I reckon I wasn't the first strange bird she'd seen that summer, for she fed me, and that night she steered me to a friend of hers who was in the clothing business and did a little bartering evenings. He charged a hundred for a suit of hand-me-downs and twenty for a hair cut and a shave—we enlisters never argued over trifles—and shipped me back to Pennsylvania. But maybe you won't believe it—by that time I had sorter lost my nerve. I got a notion in my head that every man who looked my way was spying on me. I couldn't pass the time of day with anyone who didn't seem to talk about deserters. I was afraid to get a gold piece changed, for all the gold went out of sight about that time, and just to have one was suspicious. So what do you think I did? I walked right into a recruiting station and enlisted without getting a cent. 'Rah for the flag!' I says. 'Gimme a gun. I want to fight.' That was in Pittsburgh."
The professor's start was too slight to break the narrative, but if possible his watchfulness deepened; he leaned forward and his eyes held those of Budd.
"Yes," the cook continued, "in Pittsburgh. Same old band; same old handkerchiefs waving; same old 'God bless you, boys!' I thought at first I was all right and 'twould be the same old game, but it wasn't. They had me spotted with a lot of others, and they kept us guarded like a parcel of wild beasts, for all we was enlisted regular in the 120th Pennsylvania."
"The 120th Pennsylvania?" repeated the professor slowly.
"That's what I said!" Budd resented the interruption. "And I tell you it was no way to treat men. There must have been forty of us shut up in a baggage car with no light or air but from one door open at the end, and there we was for days and nights, and a tough lot, too! Bounty men and substitutes and drafted truck, slamming along to the front, cussing our luck, and everyone of us ready to bolt at the first chance. I stood it till I heard the guns roaring like sin, not five miles off. Say, did you ever hear that sound? Did you ever hear a gun you knew was fired at real men and sending them to Kingdom Come? I heard it once, and that was enough. We was laying flat along the floor, side by side as though we was dead already, and next me was a German-looking guy, what had been praying and swearing, turn about, ever since we started. When he heard the firing, he went clean off his nut; he'd have blown his brains out rather than take the chance of letting somebody else do it for him; he'd have fought the Union army single-handed sooner than listen to them shots another minute. Well, to make a long story short, him and me we fixed up a scheme."
The speaker caught his breath to listen, for the forest seemed suddenly alive with sound and motion. A cloud swept down the valley of the North Fork, so low that shreds of scud were caught in the topmost branches. Hail pattered on the wire grass. The tent curtains flapped noisily, and in the shadow the aspen leaves flashed white as though a mailed army sprang from ambush.
"Go on!" the professor urged, and the cook held up a brawny fist and shook it at the universe defiantly.