The judge was taken off his guard by the inconsistent levity, and demanded the meaning of the term with acerbity.
"Holt, were you ever in battle?" he counter queried.
The man of law was a man of peace; he had seen lead, but in seals, not bullets.
Secretary of War Stanton was spurring the military justice on, as often before.
"Did Stanton ever march in the first line, to be shot at like this man?"
Holt answered for his colleague in the negative.
"Well, I tried it in the Black Hawk War!" proceeded the Illinoisian, "and I remember one time I grew awful weak in the legs when I heard the bullets whistle around me and saw the enemy in front of me. How my legs carried me forward I cannot now tell, for I thought every minute that I should sink to the ground. I am opposed to having soldiers shot for not facing danger when it is not known that their legs would carry them into danger! Well, judge, you see the papers crowded in there? You call them cases of 'Cowardice in the face of the enemy,' a long title, but I call them my 'Leg Cases,' for short!--and I put it to you, Holt, and leave it to you to decide for yourself, if Almighty God gives a man a cowardly pair of legs, how can he help them running away with him?"
HOW THE DELINQUENT SOLDIER PAID HIS DEBT.
There is a great similarity in the many stories of Lincoln's leniency to soldiers incurring the death-penalty according to the code of war, and no wonder, when they were so numerous that he often had four-and-twenty sentences to sign or ignore in a day.
A member of a Vermont regiment was so sentenced for sleeping at his post. The more than usual intercession made for him induced Lincoln to visit the culprit in his cell. He found him a simple country lad, impressing him as a reminder of himself at that age. In the like plain and rustic vein he discoursed with him.