ONE:Norma headed for her own cubicle, where she ignored the papers and the telephone messages waiting for her and reached for the intercom button instead. She pushed it twice and a voice said:
TWO:With a shiver of apprehension, with a nervous memory of the bitter hours just past, with the sight before their eyes of the scarcely-cold dead, the remainder of the company fell in with sadly-shrunken ranks.
ONE:"Why," Gid Mackall complained to the rest of them, "Corpril Elliott said that we could begin to look out for guerrillas jest as soon's we crossed the Ohiothat the whole o' Kentucky was full of 'em. I believe Corpril Elliott knows more about his business than Sargint Klegg. Sargint Klegg seems careless like. I see lots o' fellers along the road in butternut clothes that seemed savage and sneaky like. They looked at us in a way that made me certain they wuz spying us, and had their guns hid away somewhere, ready to jump us whenever there wuz a good chanst.""Who are you, boys?" said the newcomer, after gravely returning the salute.
TWO:"I don't believe it," said the Orderly, "I've watched old Truax, when he's been roaring around, and I always found that he was after somebody that deserved it. Men of that kind are pretty certain to be very soft on good soldiers, like Si and Shorty, and I think he's all right. The boys of the 1st Oshkosh all swear by him, and you can trust a man's own regiment to know him surer than anybody else. And then there's Capts. Suter and Harris, of the Maumee Muskrats."
ONE:"No," he said to the second, "that sick mother racket won't work. Every man we ketch now skulking home is goin' to see his sick and dying mother. There wouldn't be no army if we allowed every man who has a sick mother to go and visit her. None o' your back talk, or I'll put the irons on you."
TWO:I'm asking for your support, then, as a matter of practical politics. In a risky matter like this one, support can make all the difference between....Cadnan thought this too obvious to be worth reply, and waited.
