“Oh, your turn will come some day,” mumbled Wallis, remembering Gildersleeve’s jealousy of the brigade commander—a jealousy which only gave tongue when aroused by “commissary.” “If you do as well as usual to-morrow you can have your own brigade.”
“I suppose you think we are all going to do well to-morrow,” scoffed old Grumps, whose utterance by this time stumbled. “I suppose you expect to whip and to have a good time. I suppose you brag on fighting and enjoy it.”
“I like it well enough when it goes right; and it generally does go right with this brigade. I should like it better if the rebs would fire higher and break quicker.”
“That depends on the way those are commanded whose business it is to break them,” growled Old Grumps. “I don’t say but what we are rightly commanded,” he added, remembering his duty to superiors. “I concede and acknowledge that our would-be Brigadier knows his military business. But the blessing of God, Wallis! I believe in Waldron as a soldier. But as a man and a Christian, faugh!”
Gildersleeve had clearly emptied his canteen unassisted; he never talked about Christianity when perfectly sober.
“What was your last remark?” inquired Wallis, taking his pipe from his mouth to grin. Even a superior officer might be chaffed a little in the darkness.
“I made no last remark,” asserted the Colonel with dignity. “I’m not a-dying yet. If I said anything last it was a mere exclamation of disgust—the disgust of an officer and gentleman. I suppose you know something about our would-be Brigadier. I suppose you think you know something about him.”
“Bet you I know all about him,” affirmed Wallis. “He enlisted in the old Tenth as a common soldier. Before he had been a week in camp they found that he knew his biz, and they made him a Sergeant. Before we started for the field the Governor got his eye on him and shoved him into a Lieutenancy. The first battle h’isted him to a Captain. And the second—bang! whiz! he shot up to Colonel, right over the heads of everybody, line and field. Nobody in the old Tenth grumbled. They saw that he knew his biz. I know all about him. What’ll you bet?”
“I’m not a betting man, Lieutenant, except in a friendly game of poker,” sighed Old Grumps. “You don’t know anything about your Brigadier,” he added in a sepulchral murmur, the echo of an empty canteen. “I have only been in this brigade a month, and I know more than you do, far, very far more, sorry to say it. He’s a reformed clergyman. He’s an apostatized minister.” The Colonel’s voice as he said this was solemn and sad enough to do credit to an undertaker. “It’s a bad sort, Wallis,” he continued, after another deep sigh, a very highly perfumed one, the sigh of a bar-keeper. “When a clergyman falls, he falls for life and eternity, like a woman or an angel. I never knew a backslidden shepherd to come to good. Sooner or later he always goes to the devil, and takes down whomsoever hangs to him.”