“Some of my men have been quick to learn and are now experts. If any of you gentlemen desire it, I will send some of the best of them to you now and then to help you instruct your cannoniers and your gunners. You will yourselves impress upon the magazine men the importance of not compressing the powder in measuring it. A very slight inattention at that point often makes a difference of twenty-five or fifty yards in the range, and so renders worthless and ineffective a shell which might otherwise do its work well. If you need the services of any of my men as tutors to your own, pray call upon me. Now good evening. I’m sorry I cannot invite you to sup with me, but I really haven’t so much as a hard-tack biscuit to offer you.” When the officers had gone, Kilgariff and Brent seated themselves on top of the magazine mound and talked. “First of all,” said Arthur Brent, “I want to hear about the things personal to yourself. You put them aside, in your letter, as of smaller consequence than the matters, whatever they were, which related to others. I do not so regard them. So tell me first of them.” “Oh, those things have pretty well settled themselves,” answered Kilgariff, with a touch of disgust in his tone. “It was only that I very much wanted to decline this captain’s commission, under which I have been commanding sixty mortars and something like a battalion of men here. General Early fairly forced the rank upon me, after Captain Pollard lost his leg—” “By the way,” interrupted Doctor Brent, “Pollard is at Wyanoke and convalescent. With his superb constitution and his lifelong wholesomeness of living, his recovery has been rapid. He very much wants to see you. He would like you to continue in command of his battery—or would have liked it if you had not been transferred to Petersburg. He is a major now, you know, promoted for gallantry and good service, and when he returns to duty (which will be within a day or two) he will have command of his battalion. Of course, your special qualification for the work you are doing here forbids you to go back to your battery. The chief of artillery would never permit that. But I’m interrupting. Tell me what you set out to say.” “Well, it’s all simple enough. You know my reasons for wishing to be an enlisted man rather than a commissioned officer. When I wrote to you, I was acting as captain under General Early’s peremptory orders, but the commission he had asked the authorities at Richmond to send me had not yet come. I knew that if it should come while I was with Early, he would never let me decline it. He would have refused even to forward my declination through the regular channels. It was my hope to get myself ordered to Petersburg before the commission could come.