Sergeant Mallory paused. I lifted my head and saw, out of the corner of my eye, my brother's restraining hand on his sergeant's shoulder.

Before he could speak, Lieutenant Fisk stepped forward. "Private Borginnis, do you realize that disobedience - well nigh mutiny - in the time of battle can be a hanging offense, and therefore ten lashes is mild and merciful punishment?"

I let my head sink.

"Disobedience now could mean the death of all of us, and what is worse - the failure of our cause."

With my head gritted against the tearing pain of three lacerations, I did not trust myself to speak, to tell Kelly to get the hell away. I didn't want him to see this. I dug my fingernails into the rough wood of the rafter, and braced myself. I glanced behind to see what was happening. Mallory pointed the whip at the water barrel. Kelly looked away. Fisk nodded. Mallory dipped the cat o'nine tails and then shook water from it in little flicks.

"Come on! Don't tarry - let's get this over with!" shouted Kelly angrily, stealing the whip from Mallory's hands.

Crack! "FOUR!" the Crawdads and Pugilists shouted as ordered. They were the ones who had also attacked the Metal Man.

Crack! "FIVE!" Nine knotted strands of leather, water-heavy, felt like a handful of hot coals smeared against my back.

"There! Look at him. Five is sufficient on my account, lieutenant," said Kelly. I looked back as best I could.

"Ten is sufficient on my account, lieutenant," said Fisk. "Do you want me to - "

"Go to the deuce," said Kelly, lifting the whip. "Face front!" he ordered me.

Crack! It got harder and harder for me to hear anything but the whip after that. It cracked and cracked against my bloody back. I was dimly aware of the annoyed and insistent buzzing of flies disturbed by the blows that opened the slow sluices of their wine. As my awareness receded inward, the more acutely could I feel the little pressings of their six legs on my sweaty face. At least some of them critters on my back must have gotten killed, I thought. Unfortunately I did not lose consciousness. I felt every blow. Crack!

"Ten - !"

I tried to let myself relax slowly. I tried not to exhale too violently, and excite my wounds.

"Got anything to say now, Borginnis," asked Fisk wearily.

"Yeah...Remember the Alamo?" I groaned. My back was on fire.

"Remember the Alamo!" shouted Kelly. "Remember the Alamo! Remember the Alamo!"

The agitated men picked it up, taking refuge in the cry: "REMEMBER THE ALAMO!"

They all meant it in a more rallying sense than I had meant when I recalled that slaughter, so much like this one. The odds against them was 16 to 1, whereas our odds were so much better, being 10 against our 1.

"You'll be all right, Jack," said Kelly in my ear, cutting my wrists free. "This affair is closed," he called out.

"Yes," agreed Fisk. "And let us now hold in our minds the high example set by our dear Major."

I wrapped my arm around his neck. Kelly slowly dragged me into the gallery. I stopped at the entryway, panting on the fresh air.

"It hurts bad, don't it, Jack?" he said, licking his lips. "I don't mind you pluggin' that danged Perfessor so much as makin' yourself so conspicuous in front of everybody! You made a bad name for yourself. Ain't no reason for askin' for trouble. It's like you done it on purpose, Jack! What's wrong with you, boy, don't you got no sense at all? Gall darn but you are bleedin'! I'm awful sorry `bout this Jack. Awful sorry. Let's don't tell Ma about it."

"Don't tell Sarah," I said, although I knew this hard gossip was all ready known throughout the fort. "Don't jiggle me - just hold still while I try to catch my breath." Outside, I saw Captain Holm's silhouette by the flash of our mortar at Platform 3. "Sorry `bout getting blood on your gold braid, there," I said.

A Music, running by clutching a message, stopped when he saw me.

"GIT!" cried Kelly, and the boy flew.

"Jack will you promise me to mind your step, now?"

I thought about it. "...No."

Kelly winced, then said, "Tell me why you won't, then."

"I'll tell you," I said, raising my voice a little:"Jacob Bently!"

"Oh!" cried my brother with annoyance:"But that weren't your fault!"

He knew the story, because he was also stationed at Camp Greenhorn when it happened - only, when it happened, he was lollygagging with the boys in the Officer's Club, while I was right there on the hot and dusty trail. We were all green as apples and Sergeant Mallory had the job of toughening us up for what we all supposed would be a good and lazy campaign of Injun-fighting.

He tried to burn the baby out of us, as he put it, forcing us to march too many miles in the wet smothering heat of a Maryland backwater July. We were hauling our muskets, Volta's Piles, and packs up and down the hills, a hundred gnats making black halos around our shakos, ten miles up and down without water, twelve, fourteen. At fourteen it happened.

Joseph Bently broke rank and ran ahead to the horse that was hauling all the water we were supposed to get at the sixteen mile post. Bently was pasty faced underneath and flushed pink on top; but soon enough he was grey.

He tore off his shako, dropped his musket and pack on the trail, and ran ahead. A holler went up through the ranks and pretty soon there was a mob all around Private Bently, who'd wrestled the water barrel off the horse and pried the lid off and dunked his whole head in.

Sergeant Mallory waded through the mob, a big dimpled grin on his whiskered cheeks. "Well then," he laughed, hands on hips. "This gives us an opportunity to kill two birds with one barrel, so to speak. First, look at you! Behold yourselves, and the perils of breaking rank! One man goes, and you all follow. One minute you're a a formation of Regulars, a phalanx.! Next minute and centurions become a bunch of schoolboys, runnin' around chasin' girls. Well I'll tell you. Every livin' one of you'd be brained by a tomahawk by now."

We all laughed, Bently too, dripping wet.

"Have another drink, Mr. Bently, sir," smiled the sergeant, giving us a wink that he couldn't see.

Bently looked unsure at first but when the sergeant kept smiling and said again, "What's done is done. Go ahead!" he smiled back and leaned to drink from his cupped hand.

The Sarge pointed to three of us - me being the third - and just said with another wink, "Give Bently a hand, would you, boys?" We snicked because we knew what he meant.

We were always having that kind of fun at Camp Greenhorn. We called it "Spirit". Straggler's get themselves tied to a tree, bad marchers'd get themselves tripped and trod on, and sloppy dressers (like me, just once) would find themselves forced at bayonet point to parade at midnight in just their longjohns. That was Spirit, and that Spirit filled us with its good fun as we three grabbed aholt of Bently's hair and arms and we dunked his head down good and deep.

The whole company started busting out laughing. Bently began to fuss and fight something awful. He thrashed and splashed around so much that some of his frightening screams echoed among the Maryland pines. But Mallory shook his head, like Bently hadn't learnt his lesson yet.

He raised his thick arms so humorously like a choirmaster, we laughed again even as we picked up and hollered out "Hail Columbia!" after "Hail Columbia!"

Firm, united let us be,
Ral'ying `round our Liberty,
Like a band of brothers join'd
Peace and safety we shall find.

It wasn't till the third chorus, when I was singing out, "...as a band of brothers join'd..." that I got to feel anxious about our little game of Spirit, for Joseph Bently had left off his struggling.

I wasn't the only one. By and by all the singing died down.

Sergeant Mallory pushed us three away and brought up the dripping slack-faced thing.

He lost his grip and Bently splashed back in the tub then, his head bumping thump! thump! against the wood as he washed back and forth...

One too many chorus of Hail Columbia had cooked that noodle too long. We figured maybe he panicked and swallowed water the wrong way, and then in fright something in his brain burst. He had drowned in thirty inches of water.

The War Department neglected to tell his folks that detail. They promoted him to lieutenant before they railed him home. They sent Sergeant Mallory south of the telegraph poles into the thick of the Injun fight, until it came time to defend the Peninsula of Texas from the pesky Lunars, and Secretary Marcy needed every one of his eight thousand Dough-Boys to march up a ramp to the gondola of a steam-balloon.

I felt awful bad - same as everyone else - about poor Joe Bently dying on us like that. But I was sure - and everyone assured me - that I - Jack Borginnis - me personally - was not so much to blame. And pretty soon it looked like everyone just forgot about it. (Except after that our Spirit didn't have so much gumption in it at all.)

Up until the time he drowned, I was glad to be doing what I was doing to Joe. I wouldn't have broken rank if it wasn't for his example. I wouldn't have felt so thirsty all of a sudden if it wasn't for him. He was a foolish obstacle on my long road to glory.

But ever since, it was like I was waking up, only I was waking up from a good dream into a nightmare.

So I got myself whipped on purpose. I wanted Joe Bently whipped out of my blood. I wanted that crime leeched out.

But it didn't work! Just mentioning his name to my brother made feel just as awful guilty all over again!

" - It wasn't your fault, Jack - just pass over it," Kelly whispered.

That conspiratorial whisper was a shame soaked hiss that stung my fleshless part - it was a steam burn on my soul, if I had one.

So I swayed there feeling sick, dizzy, and dreary, not knowing what to do. I resisted his tug on my arm. "You believe in god?" I asked. We both looked up - dirt trickled down - a mortar shell had thumped on the Bomb-Proof roof above us. We waited for it to blow - nothing happened.

He looked at me strangely.

"`Course," he said offhand.

"Why?"

We heard the shell roll off the roof and fall to the side.

"H'm," he sighed impatiently. "...When you put it like that - ! Well...Jack! Of course I believe in god! Don't every-body? Now we got to get your bleedin' all bunged-up, boy - "

I wouldn't move. "But why?"

"H'm...Well - I figure it like this. It's like poker. I ain't got nothin' to lose if it turns out God's bluffin' - I'm bluffin' too! An' if there is a god, as of course there is, well, if I let him win, I win too, don't I? It's odds you can't lose, when you wager Belief."

"God's got the danged poker-face I've ever seen, then," I replied. I was going to go on to say that poker seemed like a dang fool way to run a government - and that's what it was, wasn't it, up in heaven, a government - a monarchy run by a mean poker-faced river gambler? I was going to say this, when just then there was an explosion.

Ka-pow! - the mortar shell finally burst - the Music, farther down, shouted -

In that instant I owned up to the fact that I hadn't forgiven myself, that I wasn't a-going to forgive myself ever. Never. So nothing had changed - almost. All my woe wasn't for naught exactly. My fleshless wounds, like my fleshy, could heal over with callous tissue, but the scar would always mark me a trespasser into evil. I'd be flogged forever, for I couldn't - I wouldn't forgive myself, and therefore could not change. That proud (maybe vain) self-assertion of wicked guilt in the nil gave me something - a vector in space - a laceration in flesh - a magnetism in a hunk of iron - a strength and a purpose:a godless and unmoral atonement -

- the shell burst sent a torrent of dirt clods rolling down the entryway. And there, tumbled among the dirt clods, lay spilt the disinterred corpse of Gunnery Sergeant Oscar Rutherford Weigart!

What a horrible sight! It was headless hideousness - pale, broken, decayed! What a terrible caprice of chance! What a gallows-humor prank did lawless nature please, to land her bomb on a dead man's grave, when so many of us still living hid underground beside him!

If war wasn't so gross and grim it would be a farce.

The Worm had stupid sharp-beaked agents which refused to respect the proprieties of glory -

I was so weak that the sight of that broken and chewed corpse was shock enough to drop me. Kelly lifted me and bore me swiftly into the Infirmary. Reverend McKnight lay me on my stomach. Sarah washed my wounds but would not meet my eyes. As night fell on the 6th of May I woke to the hot itch of my wounds and listened to the weakening sighs of Major Brown.

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