“Grandfather,” he said, “I think if you won't need me for a while I'll enlist to-morrow.”
“I can get along all right,” said the old man, “but I'm sorry you're going.”
The older man was looking at the younger one narrowly. Suddenly and bluntly he asked:—
“Is anything the matter with you and Ethel Harvey?”
Jim nodded, and without further invitation or questioning he related the whole incident. “That's all there is to it,” he concluded. “The team had bolted and she wouldn't give me the reins; so I took them away from her and pulled in the horses. There was nothing else to do.”
“And then she said she hated you,” added Jonathan, musingly. “I reckon she hasn't much sense.”
“It ain't that,” Jim answered quickly. “She's got sense enough. The trouble with her is she's too damned plucky.”
A few days later he was a private in the Nineteenth Indiana Volunteers. He made a good soldier, for not only did he love danger as had his great-grandfather before him, but he had nerves which months of inaction could not set jangling, and a constitution which hardship and privation could not undermine.
The keenest delight he had ever known came with his first experience under fire. He felt his breath coming in long deep inhalations; he could think faster and more clearly than at other times, and he knew that his hands were steady and his aim was good. Somehow it seemed that years of life were crowded into those few minutes, and he retired reluctantly when the order came.
His regiment was in the Army of the Potomac, and the story of its waiting and blundering and magnificent fighting need not be told again in these pages. Jim was one of thousands of brave, intelligent fighters who did not rise to the command of a division or even of a regiment. He was a lieutenant in Company E when the Nineteenth marched down the Emmittsburg Pike, through Gettysburg and out to the ridge beyond, to hold it until reenforcements should come.