never call you anything else but Miss Caroline while
you permit me to address you at all--understand it--I've associated with
your boy too long. Well, I did do four years of fighting, and I was
mustered out with the rank of Major. You might as well know it now as
later. You'll have longer to forget it. I wish I could forget it myself.
Not the fact, for I should fight again as long and try to fight harder
in the same cause, but the hellishness of it--the damnable, inhuman
obscenity of it--I should like to forget. I never said so before, Miss
Caroline,--there was no one to say it to,--but it made me old before my
time. Why, I could almost be a son of yours, if you will pardon that
minor brutality, and the thing is aging me to this day. I helped to kill
your young men and your old men, but you ought to know that I didn't do
it for holiday sport. The first one of your men I saw dead lay alone by
the roadside, a boy, foolishly young, with a tired face that was still
smiling. He'd fallen there as if sleep had overtaken him on the march.
Our column had halted, and I went to him. It must have taken a full
minute for me to realize that this was dignified war and not the murder
of a boy in a homely gray uniform. When I did realize it, I was so
weakened that I broke down and cried. I was a private then. I covered
his face, and got up strong enough to assault two other privates who had
found my snivelling funny. One of them went to the field hospital, and I
went under arrest when I'd finished with the other. You ought to know,
Miss Caroline, that the sight of thousands of your other dead never
moved me to any merriment. I tried to be a good soldier, but I felt the
death pains of every fallen man I saw. I didn't stop to note the color
of his uniform. Miss Caroline--"

I waited until I had made her look at me.

"The war is over, you know. Suppose you forget me as a soldier and take
me as a man. Really, I believe we ought to know each other better."

Clem had once found occasion to say, "When Miss Cahline tek th' notion
to shine huh eyes up, she sho' is a highly illuminous puhsonality."

I saw then what he meant, for Miss Caroline had "shined" her eyes, and
they flooded me with a distracting medley of lights. I thought she
struggled very uncertainly with herself. Her eyes shifted from my face
to the empty sleeve. Twice before that evening--I remembered it had been
when she spoke so enigmatically of the lumber industry--her eyes had