Why, he asked himself, should Lige not love her, as well as he? She was not their sister. He had the right. Handsome Lige. Merry, sparkling, generous Lige! No wonder she loved him!
He stole away unobserved. Then when he had reached the house he called out loudly, "Lige, oh, Lige, Mother wants you!"
When he saw Lige coming he turned away.
He hoped he was not selfish, but he could not speak to him then.
He made no effort to see Nina alone, but bade her good-bye the next day with the same grave, sad, brotherly kiss that he gave to Mary and Sara and Ruth.
CHAPTER XXVIII
IN FIELD AND CAMP
When the First Nebraska Volunteers embarked at Omaha under the command of Colonel John M. Thayer, on July twenty-first, Joe and Elijah Peniman and Herbert James went with it.
The troops were raw and undisciplined, the equipment poor, food scanty and hard to get.
The Peniman boys, neither of whom had ever been away from home before, were desperately homesick, and seeing the sordidness of war, its meanness, its dirtiness and its horrors at close range, and losing some of their high vision in the daily muck and grind, came gradually almost to believe that their father was right, and that they had gone against his will, violated the faith of their childhood, and broken their mother's heart to follow a chimera that could only end in utter defeat.