“Why—the new part,” he told her. “Didn’t you notice? Every last one of ’em was goin’ on about country and folks. That’s why they want to go.”
She was silent, and he was afraid that she did not understand.
“I never thought of it till to-night, either,” he excused her. “Don’t you see? Fellows don’t want to go to war just to smash around for a fight. It’s for somethin’ else.”
He stopped, vaguely uncomfortable in his exaltation.
“It’s killin’,” she said, “an’ killin’ ’s killin’.”
He stood still on the walk, regardless of the passers, and shook her arm.
“Good heavens,” he said, “women had ought to see that. Women are better’n men, and they’d ought to see it! Can’t you get past the killin’? Can’t you understand they might have a thunderin’ reason?”
“No reason don’t matter,” she said. “It’s killin’. And it ain’t anything else.”
He walked on, his head bent, his eyes on the ground. She knew that he was disappointed in her—but she was too much shaken to think about that. She remembered how her mother had watched her brother go out to fight after some mean uprising of drunken whites against the Indians. Nobody knew now what it had been about, but six men had been shot. That stayed.
Presently the Inger raised his head, and walked with it thrown back again. Women, he supposed, wouldn’t understand. They were afraid—they hated a gun—they hated a scratch. There was the woman with the blue-boned hand and wrist and the pink spangled fan—she understood, it seemed. But somehow that proved nothing, and he freed his thought of her.