ZEBEDEE was the Captain of Company Q. Sheer merit had won him the title. He was the first and the last of his kind. He stood unique. For it was the only Company Q that had ever been captained—Company Q being the stragglers and camp-followers, miscellaneous and heterogeneous, who drift in an army’s wake.
Unique though Zebedee’s position was, it was far from satisfying the ambition that he had once cherished. For he had longed to be a soldier. He had dreamed of doing great deeds; of rising from the ranks, of steadily mounting upward, of winning lofty title and mighty fame.
But the surgeon curtly refused him. It was the heart, he said. And when Zebedee, amazed, bewildered, for he had never suspected himself to be a sick man, stammered a protest, the surgeon said a few cutting words about worthless men trying to get in for pay and pension—which words were to Zebedee as blows. And he yielded with such bleak finality as never again to ask for enlistment.
But although he himself could scarcely explain how it came to pass, he found himself a camp-follower, a drudge, a volunteer servant to the command of a general to whose fame he gave humble and admiring awe. At first the soldiers had tolerated him; gradually there had come a recognition of his willingness, his good-nature, his real cleverness. It somehow came to be believed that it was by some vagrant choice of his own that he was a member of Company Q, and none ever dreamed that he longed with pathetic intensity for his lost chance of being a soldier. On the march he wore a look of exaltation whenever, which was not seldom, two or three of the men would carelessly give him their muskets to carry. In the camp he was happy if he could do some service—he would chop wood, build fires, and cook. And in time of battle he was perforce resigned when the soldiers marched by him into the smoke and the roar, leaving him behind to hold some officer’s horse or look after some tent.
But the innate spirit that, if given the opportunity, would have carried him far upward, made him master of the motley members of Q, and it gradually came to be that his words had the force of law with them.
He never assumed a complete uniform. His very reverence for it and for all that it represented kept him from such a height of undeserved glory. But he tried to satisfy his craving soul with the tattered jacket of an artilleryman, a shabby cavalry cap, and the breeches of infantry; and the sartorial dissimilitude, through the working of some obscure logic, obviated presumption yet kept alive some pride.
How it happened that Zebedee was so often in dangerous places which the other members of Company Q carefully avoided was a puzzle to the soldiers, and it came to be ascribed to a sort of blundering heedlessness—not bravery, of course, for he was only a camp-follower.
And one day, when the command failed in its attack upon a fort, Zebedee found himself with the handful who fled for safety close up against the hostile works. There they were protected from shots from above; and the enemy dared not, on account of a covering fire, come out into the open to attack them; and there they hoped to stay till darkness should permit retreat.
But the day was blisteringly hot, and thirst began to madden them. Then Zebedee slung about him a score of canteens, and dashed out across the plain, and lead rained pitilessly about him as he jingled on, but he was not hit. His canteens were swiftly filled by friendly hands, and he turned to go back across that deadly space.
