“Waal I do believe there’s one part of him that’s growed;” Gatts is very solemn.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“His feet.”
Private Gatts has promised me one of the Kaiser’s ears!
Then there is Brady, “Devil Brady” the little black Irish coal-miner from Oklahoma, who spends his days trying to get put in the guard-house, so he won’t have to drill.
“I’m plumb disgusted,” he confided to me today. “I never worked so hard in my life as I did the other night gettin’ drunk, an’ then the guard was so much drunker than I was, I had to carry him to the guard-house. I thought sure they’d give me thirty days at least, but they only kept me twenty-four hours and then out!”
“Hard luck,” I sympathized.
“I just knew how it would be,” he mourned. “It was Friday the thirteenth when I joined the army; there were just thirteen of us fellers, and the thirteenth was a nigger.”
He tells me the most wonderful yarns about the miners and their pet rats, about explosions and disasters and rescue parties. Last night he told me the story of one mine-horror that will stick in my memory.
“And we shoveled the last three men and a mule into one bag,” he finished.