The Proud and the Free by Howard Fast Read Free Book Online Page B

pledge, said the Scot sourly. Ye would mistrust your own mother, and me that has never been corporal even, for I would not put my head where some will!
    And I’m a better man than you are, Danny Connell, he added. Or any other black Roman! Would you make something of that?
    If I were not this tired, answered Connell wearily.
    Button yer lip, MacGrath, said I, putting my arm through his, for you are my man now. We need a hundred more to the twenty fine lads ye have found, and then we will figure out the putting into action of all the fine plans they cook up here.
    And I turned him to the door —
    Come along, and if yer head rings a little, and if ye find your belly rubbing your backbone, it’s but a temporary nuisance; for it seems to me that we’re on the wildest jig a man ever danced.
    And it’s no pleasure dancing when the ground is four feet below ye, MacGrath said solemnly. Ye do not intend to go into that cursed cold at this hour of the morning, Jamie Stuart?
    Indeed I do. There is no more sleep for us, Angus, until this is finished.
    There is sleep for me, the Scot said stubbornly. I have done my round of this mad duty.
    I slid my musket from the rack and looked at him. Then I said:
    Well now, Angus MacGrath, this is a new hitch for me, but the skin of my neck is tight enough for me to play it out, and to tell you the truth, I don’t much give a damn at this point. I have lived in hell too long, and I will not see my sweet Molly again, and the whole fact of it is that I’m past caring for anything but the one chance in a thousand we are playing for. So what do you say?
    I leveled the musket at him; and from me he looked to the eleven grim-visaged men who sat at the sawbuck table, all of them watching us, but no one of them saying a word, and still Katy Waggoner in front of the fire, keening her plaintive lullaby.
    What will I do? I thought to myself then. What will I do? Will I shoot down this great brave man, this large ugly Scotsman who is like a brother to me – or will I back out? And if I do back out, what then? What sort of a wild venture have I embarked on, that every step of the way it comes to a crisis that must either be driven home, like the peg into its wooden loin, or left to triumph on the ashes of our insane hopes? Are any of us sane? Or are we all mad with hunger and cold and humiliation?
    Yet for all of these thoughts, I knew that I was sane – saner indeed than I have ever before been, in all of my life, and I also knew that I would slay Angus MacGrath or any other who stood in our path from here on. Something had happened to me, just as something had happened to the eleven at the table; a new fire had been lit, and the heat of its flame was still untested.
    Well, I will be damned, said MacGrath. Here is Jamie Stuart, with the pap still wet on his mouth, and he holds a gun on me. By all that is holy! Well, it will take the gentry to slay me, not such a skinny lad as you, Jamie Stuart. So let us go out into that cursed cold night and do yer crazy business.
    And I went out arm-in-arm with Angus MacGrath, and when I returned, as I said, there was dawning in the smoky air, and still hardly a beginning had been made by the Committee. I brought them an accounting of the Line, which was three thousand and fifty-two enlisted men, as near as I could reckon it with no access to the officers’ records.
    Just for a moment before I entered the hut, I paused and looked across the silent, flat parade ground, with its lines of huts and its tracked-over, dirtying snow. It slumbered in uneasy peace; but what, I wondered, would it be like a few hours from now? Would that pale, cold sun, nudging the mist so timidly, look down upon a sanguine plain of fratricidal horror? And would this be the end of all the best hopes that the ragged band of us had ever entertained? Yet I was committed, so what did it matter? And as for nightmares – had I not lived long enough in the midst of