Billy smiled. “Ain’t he a funny mixture? Hates a speck of mud ’most as much as he hates a greyback! Funny when I think of how I used to hate _him_!” He looked along the line and at the companies in reserve and at the clusters of officers, with here or there a solitary figure, and at the regiments of the Stonewall Brigade, and the other brigades of Johnson’s division, and then out through a crack between two logs, to the picket line beyond the abatis and to the misty wood. “I don’t know that I hate anybody now,” said Billy aloud. “Don’t you?” asked the man next him. “I wouldn’t be a namby-pamby like that! I couldn’t get along without hating, any more than I could without tansy in the spring-time!” “Oh, thar air times,” said Billy equably, “when I think I hate the Yanks.” “Think! Don’t you know?” Billy was counting the cartridges in his cartridge-box. “Why,” he said when he had finished, “sometimes of course I hate them like p’ison oak. But then thar air other times when I consider that—according to their newspapers—they hate me like p’ison oak, too. Now I do a power of wrong things, I know, but I air not p’ison oak. And so, according to what Allan calls ‘logic,’ maybe they air not p’ison oak either. Thar was a man in the Wilderness. The fire in the scrub was coming enough to feel the devil in it—closer and closer. And his spine was hurt and he couldn’t move, and he had his shoulder against a log, one end of which was blazing. He was sitting there all lit up by that light, and he had his musket butt up and was trying to beat out his brains. Me and Jim Watts got him out, and he was from Boston and a young man like me, and I liked him just as well as ever I liked any man. He put his arms around my neck and he hugged me and cried, and I hugged him, too, and I reckon I cried, too. And Jim and me got him out through the scrub afire. He wa’n’t no p’ison oak, no more’n I were.” “Well, what’re you fighting for?” “I am fighting,” said Billy, “for the right to secede.” Out in the fog a picket fired. Another and another followed. There arose a sputter of musketry, then a sound of voices and of running feet, heavy on the sodden earth. In a moment there was commotion, up and down, within the salient. In fell the pickets—anyhow—over the breastworks. “They’re coming! they’re coming! All of them! It looked like—!”