Older fellas in the platoon said Indians were just evil boys, blank-faced evil boys fit to kill you soon as look at you. Dark face, black eyes, Indian eyes they called them that time. Time's up, fellas, you ain't kids no more, he says. I first saw him when he was fourteen or so, very different. No more than a boy like me but even at sixteen years old he looked like a man right enough. He was with me nearly all through this exceeding surprising Yankee sort of life which was good going in every way. Thank God John Cole was my first friend in America and so in the army too and the last friend for that matter. If you pay a dollar for a dance you like a good few sweeps of the floor for that, God knows. I'm not speaking against my customers, I'm speaking for them. But all that dancing put muscle on me, in a wiry sort of way. I will not say the years going up to my army days was easy. I was seventeen or thereabouts beginning, I could not say for certain.
It might have certain shortcomings in the stitching department, but it was a uniform. He might be a spavined nag, he might be plagued by colic, he might show a goitre in his neck the size of a globe, but he was a horse. Well, I was sick of hungering.īelieve me when I say there is a certain type of man loves soldiering, no matter how mean the pay. But you were glad to get work because if you didn't work for the few dollars in America you hungered, I had learned that lesson. And they fed you queer stuff till your shit just stank. The only pay worse than the worst pay in America was army pay. If you were a one-eyed boy they might take you too even so. Since the bloom was gone off me, I had volunteered aged seventeen in Missouri. I am talking now about the finale of my first engagement in the business of war. The point was, we were glad to see them so well turned out, considering. But dead boys don't mind things like that. Wood cut so thin at the mill it was more a wafer than a plank. You lift one of those boxes and the body makes a big sag in it. True enough their boxes weren't but cheap wood but that was not the point. Anyway Death likes to make a stranger of your face. No one that knew him could have recognised Trooper Watchorn because those famous Dundrearies was gone. Their faces clean shaved, as if the embalmer sure didn't like no whiskers showing. All their uniforms brushed down with lamp-oil into a state never seen when they were alive. Like decking out our poor lost troopers for marriage rather than death. The method of laying out a corpse in Missouri sure took the proverbial cake.
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