ONE:By the time he had his letter finished, and was wiping the sweat of intense labor from his brow, he heard the bugle sounding the first call for dress parade. "I must go and begin my fatherly dooties to little Pete Skidmore," he said, carefully sealing his letter and sticking a stamp on it, to mail at the Chaplain's tent as he went by. "It's goin' to be extry fatigue to be daddy to a little cuss as lively as a schoolhouse flea, and Corpril of Co. Q, at the same time, but I'm going to do it, if it breaks a leg.""All the same, Elliott was dead-stuck on her. Bimeby he heard some way that some stay-at-home widower was settin' up to her, and she was encouragin' him, and finally married him. When Elliott heard that he was completely beside himself. He lost all appetite for everything but whisky and the blood of widowers. Whenever he found a man who was a widower he wanted to kill him. At Chickamauga, he'd pick out the men that looked old enough to be widowers, and shoot at them, and no others. In the last charge he got separated, and was by himself with a tall rebel with a gray beard. 'I surrender,' said the rebel. 'Are you a widower?' asked Elliott. 'I'm sorry to say that my wife's dead,' said the rebel. 'Then you can't surrender. I'm goin' to kill you,' said Elliott. But he'd bin throwed off his guard by too much talkin'. The rebel got the drop on him, and killed him."
TWO:"Norma!" He heard himself scream that one word over the sounds of blast and shout, and then he was out of the corridor, somehow, insanely, running across open ground. Behind him the alarms attached to the front doors of Building Three went off, but he hardly heard that slight addition to the uproar. God alone knew whether the elevators would be working ... but they had to be, they had to stand up. After he found Building One (he could hardly trust the basement levels, choked by panic-stricken personnel from everywhere) he had to get an elevator and find Norma.... He had to find Norma.The regiment had stacked arms and broken ranks.
ONE:"Eh," said the Deacon, shoving up his spectacles and taking a good look. "It certainly is. She's been down here to see the Robinses, who live out here somewhere. I'll jest go out and bring her in here."
TWO:
ONE:
TWO:"I'm goin' down there," he said, after a moment's deliberation. "Providence has sent me on this job, and intends I shall do it right, which I kin by goin' down there. Providence'll take care o' me while I'm goin'. Same time, Providence expects me to show gumption, by not exposin' myself any more'n possible.""Well, you do fight in a most amazing way," said the Orderly, cordially. "We never believed it of such rag-tag and bobtail until we saw you go up over Mission Ridge. You were all straggling then, but you were straggling toward the enemy. Never saw such a mob, but it made the rebels sick."
