“Pretty nigh.”
“How long do you suppose before we hear about father—whether he’s all right?”
“Depends on how long the battle lasts. I guess in a week.”
“That’s an awful time to wait. Your folks didn’t hear about you till ten days after it happened, did they?” He glanced at the empty sleeve.
“I believe not. But there was a good deal to ’tend to after Gettysburg. Maybe there won’t be so much in this battle.”
“I wish I was down there instead of hauling oil every day,” said the boy.
“You’re making more money hauling oil,” replied the teamster. The boy glanced at him, hurt and scornful. “Yes,” continued the man, in his quiet voice, “you’re making quite a heap of money. And as long as you’re doing that, what’s the good of running off to fight? That’s what all that gang behind us would tell you—and there’s mighty few of them that are staying away from the war to support their mothers.” In his quiet voice there brimmed suddenly the full bitterness of contempt: “Floaters—and stay-at-homes!”
The boy thought that perhaps John Denny was hard on the men. At least it was not cowardice that kept them hauling oil when they might be shouldering rifles. The boy had seen too many evidences of their courage and recklessness to believe that; he had seen also too many rough-and-tumble fights among them to believe that a distaste for fighting kept them in the paths of peace. Nor was it altogether greed for the dollars that were being so lavishly squandered in the oil country in those days that detained them; among them all there was hardly one who was laying money by.
The boy himself, with his small farm wagon, had earned as much as seventy dollars in a week. But what the men earned so rapidly they spent as royally; it was the excitement of a sudden prosperity, greater than any they had ever expected or foreseen and the joy of indulging it had made them heedless of the call to arms.
The boy was aware that whether they liked John Denny or not—and in view of his ill-concealed contempt it was hard for them to like him—they yielded him position and respect.