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Updated: June 24, 2025
Lieutenant Hall winked at his comrades, strolled hesitatingly over to the desk, balanced unsteadily on one leg, and, with his hands sticking in his trousers-pockets and his forage-cap swinging from protruding thumb and forefinger, cleared his throat, and, with marked lack of confidence, accosted his absorbed superior: "Colonel gone home?"
She felt old and detached through high-school commencement week, which is the fete of youth in Gopher Prairie; through baccalaureate sermon, senior Parade, junior entertainment, commencement address by an Iowa clergyman who asserted that he believed in the virtue of virtuousness, and the procession of Decoration Day, when the few Civil War veterans followed Champ Perry, in his rusty forage-cap, along the spring-powdered road to the cemetery.
A big lump of metal struck one of them on the chase, glanced, clipped off half the low top of his forage-cap and struck in the trunk of an oak behind him, and as his good horse flinched and quivered he looked unwillingly from the page toward a puff of white smoke on a distant hill, and with a broad smile said a mere nonsense word; but the humor of such things has an absurd valuation and persistency in camps, and for months afterward, "Ah-r? indeed!" was the battery's gay response to every startling sound.
The troopers who had reduced their clothing to a minimum, for their sole vestment consisted of a forage-cap and cartridge-belt wound along as noiselessly as Lizzie; but we poor whites with our flannel shirts and other complicated paraphernalia that custom would not permit us to dispense with in the matter-of-fact way they were laid aside by our sable allies were getting into continual trouble; now hitched up helplessly by a lawyer vine, whose sharp prickles, like inverted fish-hooks, rent the skin; now crawling unsuspiciously against a tree-ants' nest, an indiscretion that the fierce little insects visited with immediate and most painful punishment; or else, becoming aware, by unmistakable symptoms, that we were trying to force a passage through a stinging tree-shrub.
"I fear it may, sir. Weeks says he must be kept quiet and free from worry of any kind." The major paused, irresolute. He took off his forage-cap and mopped his brow with his handkerchief, then stood there twisting the cap in his hands.
"Very close: two young girls in mourning; horse, white; the old man has long moustache, blue forage-cap; gray topcoat and a Siberian dog at his heels." "And where did you leave them?" "A league hence. They will be here within the hour." "And in this inn since it is the only one in the village," said Morok, with a pensive air. "And night drawing on," added Karl. "Did you get the old man to talk?"
The chaplain recognized the beaver overcoat in the soft moonlight and the soldierly face under the forage-cap. "Ah, Cranston! Officer-of-the-day, I see. Just going the rounds?" "I was, yes, but I saw you coming, so waited. How's Hooker?" "Very low, poor fellow! Typhoid has him in tight grip. He's flighty to-night.
"It is five minutes past noon, and you are still in your forage-cap a week in barracks." Only once, at Quatre-Bras, he had said to him, "Well done, Orso! But be cautious!" But, after all, these later memories were not connected in his mind with Pietranera.
He had on his way down the hill exchanged his hat for his forage-cap, and taking Horrocks with him he galloped to the camp. Sir Penn Symons was standing on a small elevation watching the fire. Chris rode up and saluted. "I have no orders for you, Mr. King, except that when the fighting is over you will join the cavalry in pursuit."
Slowly the General rose, drew on his overcoat, and in another moment, under the sloping visor of his forage-cap, with eyes that twinkled behind their glasses, with a genial smile softening every feature, his fine soldierly face peered in on the scene of light, of merriment and laughter under the canvas roof of the only home he knew in the world the soldier home of one whose life had been spent following the flag through bivouac, camp or garrison, through many a march, battle and campaign all over the broad lands of the United States until now, at the hour when most men turned for the placid joys of the fireside, the love of devoted and faithful wife, the homage and affection of children, the prattle and playful sports of children's children homeless, wifeless, childless he stood at the border of the boundless sea, soldier duty pointing the way to far distant, unknown and undesired regions, content to follow that flag to the end of the world, if need be, and owning no higher hope or ambition than to uphold it to the end of his life.
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