“Ah'll push that guy Anderson into the sea, if we both go over on the same boat,” said Chrisfield laughing; but he added after a pause: “It would have been hell if Ah'd killed that feller, though. Honest Ah wouldn't a-wanted to do that.”
“That's the job that pays, a violinist,” said somebody.
“No, it don't,” came a melancholy drawling voice from a lanky man who sat doubled up with his long face in his hands and his elbows resting on his knees. “Just brings a living wage... a living wage.”
Several men were grouped at the end of the barracks. From them the long row of cots, with here and there a man asleep or a man hastily undressing, stretched, lighted by occasional feeble electric-light bulbs, to the sergeant's little table beside the door.
“You're gettin' a dis-charge, aren't you?” asked a man with a brogue, and the red face of a jovial gorilla, that signified the bartender.
“Yes, Flannagan, I am,” said the lanky man dolefully.
“Ain't he got hard luck?” came a voice from the crowd.
“Yes, I have got hard luck, Buddy,” said the lanky man, looking at the faces about him out of sunken eyes. “I ought to be getting forty dollars a week and here I am getting seven and in the army besides.”
“I meant that you were gettin' out of this goddam army.”
“The army, the army, the democratic army,” chanted someone under his breath.