The Lieutenant pulls his gun. "Right or wrong, I can't stand that," he says, and fires.
The little man never flinched at the report. "They cut her all to pieces, an' it didn't kill her," he says again, kind of like a phonograph.
"You get out of here, Scuts," says Terry, grabbing him by the shoulder and whirling him round.
"You leave me be," whines the little man. "God!" he says. "Cut her like that, an' it didn't kill her! An' her such a soft little thing—"
"Damn you, Scuts," says Terry, "will you cut it out, or have I got to break your head?"
"Aw, you lemme alone," whines Scuts, meek as ever. "I'm a goin', ain't I?" And he turns and trots back to quarters, never saying another word.
When we told the boys, there was cursing like you won't hear often outside the service, but after Terry had took them out in the grove in squads of half a dozen, they just stopped talking and sat down quiet in the sun, cleaning their rifles and looking at the town over across the parade. All at once, a rifle cracked, and a native over there cut for cover like a hen. The Lieutenant came running down.
"Whose gun was that?" he asks.
Old John Slattery, the oldest man in the company, with twenty-eight years in, gets up slow and stiff, and salutes. "Mine, sir," he says. "I was workin' the cartridges out of the magazine, an' she must've gone off accidental."
The boy just looks at us for about a minute. "The next one of you that fires a shot without orders," he says, "will stand up against the convent wall there in front of a squad, if I'm the only man in the squad. When the time comes," he says, "you'll have all the shooting you want. Until then, you'll leave the natives alone, or you'll have to kill me."