‘Maybe then I’d go without asking him,’ muttered Lucius rebelliously.
Ephraim laid down the gun-stock and approached him. ‘See hyar, Luce,’ he said anxiously, ‘ye ain’t got no idees in yer head, hev ye?’
Lucius burst out laughing. ‘Well, you have a way of putting things,’ he cried. ‘I believe I have just one, and that is, I am going to be a soldier.’
Ephraim considered a moment. ‘Waal,’ he said at last, ‘ef thet’s so, I believe I’ll hev to volunteer ter look after ye.’
Lucius roared afresh at this. ‘A pretty soldier you would make, Grizzly,’ he shouted. ‘I fancy I see you ambling along with a gun over your shoulder. Why, I believe you’d be scared to death the moment you let it off.’
‘Maybe I would,’ admitted Ephraim candidly. ‘I ’low I han’t been used to shootin’. But anyway, Luce, whar ye kin lead, I reckon I’ll do my best ter foller.’
The months rolled on, the battle of Manassas had been fought and won, and the Federals, driven back upon Washington in hopeless rout, with the immediate result that thousands of volunteers left the Confederate service and returned to their homes and their ordinary vocations, thinking that an enemy so easily whipped could be as easily finished off without their further help. Many officers, too, who had hastened to the front at the first call of the trumpet, leaving their plantations or their businesses to look after themselves, gladly took advantage of the temporary lull to snatch a short furlough. Among these latter was Major Markham, who since the first sudden rush upon Harper’s Ferry in April had never once left the field. Now, however, a wound received at Bull Run incapacitating him from further service for the present, he rejoined his wife and son at Markham Hall.
The picturesque descriptions which his father gave him of the leading features of the battle, along with many incidents of personal adventure and heroism, so fired Lucius’s already ardent spirit, that from that time onwards he lived in imagination the life of a soldier. He begged, he prayed, he implored, he even went on his knees to his father to allow him to join the army as a drummer-boy, as a bugler, as a mule-driver, as anything at all, in any capacity whatsoever. Major Markham laughed at his son at first, but when he realised how absolutely in earnest Lucius was, he bade him, with what show of sternness he could muster—for he could not but admire the boy’s high spirit—never to mention the subject again.