The spark in his eyes flickered into flame again. "Did I!" he murmured, purringly as a cat. "How I keep forgetting. But after all, it's merely a matter of names. Did you like what you saw?"
"No," I answered bluntly, "I did not. Your Little Gods, or your Little Devils, whatever you choose to call them, seem to me the veriest fiends. And cowardly fiends, at that. They catch men like rats, in traps, and drown them, helpless, as men drown rats."
"My son," purred my old heathen priest, "I wouldn't call them cowards, if I were you. They might not like it."
"Like it or not," said I, hotly, "they are cowards, if what I've seen of them is a fair sample of their ways. Do they never give a man a fair chance, in the open, to fight for his life, and for things dearer to him than life?"
"For life and things dearer than life," echoed my old heathen priest, and yawned, ever so slightly, and stretched his old legs out on his slab. "Dear me, I don't see why they shouldn't. Though of course I know nothing about it. Suppose," he suggested, "you look that up for yourself. I dislike to seem selfish, but really this is an hour which I invariably devote to a nap."
He made a little imperative, dismissing gesture with his hand, and—
"An' this," says big Terry Clancy, reaching over and getting a grip on the little man's collar, "this is our Scuts, the married man."
I never served in a company yet—and I've served in so many, first and last, that I'll never do anything else—I never served in a company yet that didn't have a bully and a fool in it. You can always tell them. No one ever dares to cuss out the bully, and somebody is all the time cussin' out the fool. In the old company the bully was Clancy, relieving me, as Special Orders says. We had some argument about it at first, being about of a size and the biggest men there, but Terry was younger than me, and he relieved me. The fool was a poor little yellow dog that we called Scuts. I don't even remember his name. He was the most helpless, discouraged, weak-eyed little hombre the sun ever dodged behind a cloud to keep from shining on. Worse than that, he had cold feet. All through the China campaign he was so scared he needn't have been afraid at all. A bullet couldn't hit such a little wrinkled, pinched-up thing as he was, even if it wanted to. But of course he got it worse than if he'd been just plain fool. The company don't stand for cold feet.
Even the officers got to jollyin' about him. "The little man," the Captain always called him. "H'm," grunts the Captain, the day we was getting it so bad in front of Tientsin. One of them club-footed Chinese bullets had just bored through his leg, and it looked like he'd bleed to death before the Doctor could fix him up. "H'm. Artery gone, you say? Where's the little man? He's just about the size to crawl in and hang onto it till you're ready to tie it. H'm."
It was the boys telling that to each other, and the Old Man's sending down the line afterwards to know if anybody had the makings of a cigarette, that kept the company from breaking that day, I reckon. We got it hard. If the Old Man had been with us after that, Scuts would sure have had to go. But he being in hospital, the Lieutenant just took the whole outfit with him, the part that could walk, anyway, and Scuts went back to Manila with us, and down to Samar.