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By Root 455 0

act of unbuttoning his trousers. But just as the man started to sit down, Private Williams gave him a rough push and tried to oust him from his place. A little crowd gathered about the fight which followed. From the first Private Williams had the best of it, as he was both quick and strong. While fighting, his face expressed neither effort nor anger; his features still were impassive and only the sweat on his forehead, the look of blindness in his eyes, showed the results of his struggle. Private Williams had his opponent in a helpless condition and the fight was already won when all at once he himself suddenly gave up. He seemed completely to lose interest in the fight and did not even bother to defend himself. He was soundly beaten and his head was banged viciously against the cement floor. When it was over, he stood up groggily and left the latrine without even using the commode after all.

This was not the first fight that Private Williams had provoked. During the past two weeks he had stayed in the barracks every night, and had stirred up much trouble. This was a new side of his personality that his barrack mates had not suspected. For hours he would sit in torpid silence and then all at once he would perpetrate some inexcusable offense. He no longer walked in the woods in his spare time, and at night he slept badly, disturbing the room with nightmare mutters. No one, however, gave any thought to his oddities. There was much behavior in the barracks far queerer than this. One old Corporal wrote a letter every night to Shirley Temple making it a sort of diary of all that he had done during the day, and mailing it before breakfast the next morning. Another man, who had ten years' service behind him, jumped out of a three story window because a friend would not lend him fifty cents for beer. A cook in the same battery was haunted by the fixed idea that he had cancer of the tongue, an illusion that no medical denials could dispel. He brooded before a mirror with his tongue out so far that he could see the taste buds, and he starved himself to the point of emaciation.

After the fight Private Williams went to the sleeping room and lay down on his cot. He put the sack of candy beneath his pillow and stared up at the ceiling. Outside the rain had slackened and it was now night. A number of lazy reveries colored the mind of Private Williams. He thought of the Captain, but he only saw a series of mental pictures that had no meaning. To this young Southern soldier the officers were in the same vague category as Negroes they had a place in his life, but he did not look on them as being human. He accepted the Captain as fatalistically as though he were the weather or some natural phenomenon. The Captain's behavior might seem unexpected, but he did not identify it with himself. And it did not occur to him to question it, any more than he would question a thunderstorm or the fading of a flower.

He had not been near the quarters of Captain Penderton since the night the lamp had been switched on and he saw the dark woman looking at him from the doorway. At that time a great fright had come in him but this terror had been more physical than mental, more unconscious than understood. After he had heard the front door shut, he had looked out cautiously and seen the way clear. Once safe again in the woods he had run desperately, silently, although he did not realize exactly what it was he feared.

But the memory of the Captain's wife had not left him. He dreamed of The Lady every night. Once, soon after his enlistment, he had got ptomaine poisoning and had been sent into hospital. The thought of the bad sickness in women had made him shudder beneath the cover whenever the nurses came near him, and he had lain for hours in misery rather than ask of them some service. But he had touched The Lady and he was afraid of this sickness no more. Every day he groomed and saddled her horse and watched her ride away. In the early morning there was a wintry bitterness in the air and the Captain's wife was rosy and high spirited. She always had a joke