"No kindness at all. Colonel," said the General with official curtness. "Merely my duty, to personally acquaint myself with all portions of my command. I should have visited you before. By the way, I understand you have picked up here a man belonging to my brigadeto the 200th Ind. Where is he?"
Shorty happened to be looking at another man that minute, and did not at first catch the drift of Billings's remarks. When he did, he hesitated an instant whether to whistle or try to get out. Before he could decide, Eph Glick, whom he had raided at Jeffersonville, struck him a heavy blow on the side of his head and yelled:
ONE:"The boys are certainly making up for lost time," complacently remarked Shorty, as, having taken off the edge of his own hunger with a plateful of pork-and-beans and a half loaf of bread, he stopped for a moment to survey the havoc that his young charges, ranged at a long, rough counter, were making in the Commissary stores. "They're eatin' as if this was the last square meal they expected to git till the rebellion's put down."
The office was dim now, at evening, but the figure behind the desk was rigid and unchanging, and the voice as singular as ever. "Do what you will," Dr. Haenlingen said. "I have always viewed love as the final aberration: it is the trap which lies in wait for the unwary sane. But no aberration is important, any more....""Yet I do not know," Marvor said. "This training is a hard thing, and the work is also hard when it comes."Another step. Another.