lumn. The long animal-like
thing moved slightly. Its four hundred eyes were turned upon the figure
of Collins.

"Well, sir, if that ain't th' derndest thing! I never thought Fred
Collins had the blood in him for that kind of business."

"What's he goin' to do, anyhow?"

"He's goin' to that well there after water."

"We ain't dyin' of thirst, are we? That's foolishness."

"Well, somebody put him up to it, an' he's doin' it."

"Say, he must be a desperate cuss."

When Collins faced the meadow and walked away from the regiment, he was
vaguely conscious that a chasm, the deep valley of all prides, was
suddenly between him and his comrades. It was provisional, but the
provision was that he return as a victor. He had blindly been led by
quaint emotions, and laid himself under an obligation to walk squarely
up to the face of death.

But he was not sure that he wished to make a retraction, even if he
could do so without shame. As a matter of truth, he was sure of very
little. He was mainly surprised.

It seemed to him supernaturally strange that he had allowed his mind to
man[oe]uvre his body into such a situation. He understood that it might
be called dramatically great.

However, he had no full appreciation of anything, excepting that he was
actually conscious of being dazed. He could feel his dulled mind groping
after the form and colour of this incident. He wondered why he did not
feel some keen agony of fear cutting his sense like a knife. He wondered
at this, because human expression had said loudly for centuries that men
should feel afraid of certain things, and that all men who did not feel
this fear were phenomena--heroes.

He was, then, a hero. He suffered that disappointment which we would all
have if we discovered that we were ourselves capable of those deeds
which we most admire in history and legend. This, then, was a hero.
After all, heroes were not much.

No, it could not be true. He was not a hero. Heroes had no shames in
their lives, and, as for him, he remembered borrowing fifteen dollars
from a friend and promising to pay it back the next day, and then
avoiding that friend for ten months. When at home his mother had aroused
him for the early labour of his life on the farm, it had often been his
fashion to be irritable, childish, diabolical; and his mother had died
since he had come to the war.

He saw that, in this matter of the well, the canteens, the shells, he
was an intruder in the land