“And then she said she hated you,” added Jonathan, musingly. “I reckon she hasn't much sense.”
“It ain't that,” Jim answered quickly. “She's got sense enough. The trouble with her is she's too damned plucky.”
A few days later he was a private in the Nineteenth Indiana Volunteers. He made a good soldier, for not only did he love danger as had his great-grandfather before him, but he had nerves which months of inaction could not set jangling, and a constitution which hardship and privation could not undermine.
The keenest delight he had ever known came with his first experience under fire. He felt his breath coming in long deep inhalations; he could think faster and more clearly than at other times, and he knew that his hands were steady and his aim was good. Somehow it seemed that years of life were crowded into those few minutes, and he retired reluctantly when the order came.
His regiment was in the Army of the Potomac, and the story of its waiting and blundering and magnificent fighting need not be told again in these pages. Jim was one of thousands of brave, intelligent fighters who did not rise to the command of a division or even of a regiment. He was a lieutenant in Company E when the Nineteenth marched down the Emmittsburg Pike, through Gettysburg and out to the ridge beyond, to hold it until reenforcements should come.
They fought there during four long hours, until the thin line of blue could hold no longer, and gray ranks under Ewell and Fender had enveloped both flanks. Then sullenly they came back through the town, still firing defiantly, and cursing the help that had not come. It was during this retreat that Jim was hit, but he did not drop. Somehow--though as in a dream--he kept with his regiment, and it was not until they were rallied in the cemetery on the other side of the town that he pitched forward and lay quite still.
Everybody knows how the Eleventh Corps held the cemetery through the two bloody days that followed. But Jim was unconscious of it all, for he lay on a cot in the Sanitary Commission tent, raving in delirium. And the surgeons and nurses looked at him gravely and wondered with every hour why he did not die.
But, as one of his comrades had said, “it took a lot of pounding to lick Jim Weeks,” and in a surprisingly short time he was strong enough to be taken home.