Once an Eagle Read Online Free PDF Page B

shot off like a yearling deer. What had got into her tonight? Idly he wondered if he was in love. She was beautiful, she was lively, she had a will of her own—it was fun walking and dancing and drinking cherry phosphates with her at Winnott’s Drug Store. He tried to imagine himself married to her, sprawled on the lawn in front of their own home on High Street—but there the vision abruptly ended. There was nothing more. There rose in its place those dreams of foreign lands, piling one upon another like monsoon thunderheads—a cascading diorama of alabaster cities and jungles and gaunt castle towns, of moments lurid with crises so desperate the very stoutest hearts would blanch; and finally, pressed beyond endurance, overwhelmed, all would quail but Samuel A. Damon of Walt Whitman, Nebraska, and the 6th Cavalry Regiment …
    â€œâ€¦ Ah, it was a sight to wake the dead.” Billy Hanlon’s voice was louder now, and hoarser. “There was Voybada with his throat laid open like a butchered calf, the blood running in a Niagara between the cots, and little Jerry Driscoll on his hands and knees, his head split open like a cassava melon and his brains—”
    â€œAll right, Billy,” Kitty Damon said in the sharp, forbidding tone none of them ever disputed. “That’s more than enough of such sights.”
    â€œThat’s war, my girl,” he retorted, and rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand. “What are you suggesting—that I boodle-ize it all for the boy? That’s what war is …”
    â€œâ€¦War.” Old George Verney clucked softly in his beard. “War … Why, you don’t know what battle is, Billy Hanlon. You should have stood on the bluff at Shiloh, with the Johnny Rebs coming at you thick as Spanish needles in a fence corner, with their Yip! Yip! Ya-hoooo! war cry that would freeze your blood in your bones. First time you heard it, that is. After that you paid it no mind. And the minnie balls coming overhead in a sleet storm, and the canister whizzing and whining till you could hardly think or feel or see … That was war, Billy Hanlon.”
    The younger man nodded, irritated and out of countenance. “Ah, well. Shiloh …”
    â€œYou bet, Shiloh. None of this skulking around in swamps flushing little brown-skinned boys out of their bamboo huts and giving them the water cure—”
    â€œBrown-skinned boys—they were devils incarnate, slashers and stabbers born with a machete in their hands … millions of ’em, I tell you, deep in a thousand miles of Godforsaken jungle and living by the light of your wits and a good Krag-Jorgensen rifle and a Hail Mary, full of grace. And malaria and yellow jack, don’t you forget that, the hot-and-cold chills—we walked in the rain and heat until we dropped …”
    But the old man wasn’t listening. Tilted dangerously far back in the slat-backed rocker he was launched now, living it again. “Why, at the Peach Orchard the Johnnies—”
    Hanlon rubbed his eyes, exasperated. “You going to tell us about that Peach Orchard again?”
    â€œYou wouldn’t have lasted long at the Peach Orchard. Bushwhacker. Like to see you try to give the Johnny Rebs the water cure.” George Verney emitted a high, dry cackle that was like retching, and chewed hard at the edge of his beard. Saliva lay in little foamy chains at the corners of his mouth. “They came on and they came on, as though no power on earth or under it was going to stop them. And Johnston riding out front of them, whipping them on, couldn’t none of us hit him, with a shiny bright mess cup in his hand.”
    â€œA cup, Mr. Verney?” Ty asked. “A drinking cup?”
    â€œThat’s right, boy. That’s what he was waving. He’d picked it up in the tents of the Fifty-third Ohio when they came through.”
    â€œBut didn’t he have a sword? Why