“‘Well, Ben,’ says Sam, kind of hefting his sword out from between his knees, ’as your superior officer I could court-martial you for attempted cowardice and desertion.  But I won’t.  And I’ll tell you why I’m trying for promotion and the usual honors of war and conquest.  A major gets more pay than a captain, and I need the money.’

“‘Correct for you!’ says I.  ’I can understand that.  Your system of fame-seeking is rooted in the deepest soil of patriotism.  But I can’t comprehend,’ says I, ’why Willie Robbins, whose folks at home are well off, and who used to be as meek and undesirous of notice as a cat with cream on his whiskers, should all at once develop into a warrior bold with the most fire-eating kind of proclivities.  And the girl in his case seems to have been eliminated by marriage to another fellow.  I reckon,’ says I, ’it’s a plain case of just common ambition.  He wants his name, maybe, to go thundering down the coroners of time.  It must be that.’

“Well, without itemizing his deeds, Willie sure made good as a hero.  He simply spent most of his time on his knees begging our captain to send him on forlorn hopes and dangerous scouting expeditions.  In every fight he was the first man to mix it at close quarters with the Don Alfonsos.  He got three or four bullets planted in various parts of his autonomy.  Once he went off with a detail of eight men and captured a whole company of Spanish.  He kept Captain Floyd busy writing out recommendations of his bravery to send in to headquarters; and he began to accumulate medals for all kinds of things—­heroism and target-shooting and valor and tactics and uninsubordination, and all the little accomplishments that look good to the third assistant secretaries of the War Department.

“Finally, Cap Floyd got promoted to be a major-general, or a knight commander of the main herd, or something like that.  He pounded around on a white horse, all desecrated up with gold-leaf and hen-feathers and a Good Templar’s hat, and wasn’t allowed by the regulations to speak to us.  And Willie Robbins was made captain of our company.

“And maybe he didn’t go after the wreath of fame then!  As far as I could see it was him that ended the war.  He got eighteen of us boys—­friends of his, too—­killed in battles that he stirred up himself, and that didn’t seem to me necessary at all.  One night he took twelve of us and waded through a little rill about a hundred and ninety yards wide, and climbed a couple of mountains, and sneaked through a mile of neglected shrubbery and a couple of rock-quarries and into a rye-straw village, and captured a Spanish general named, as they said, Benny Veedus.  Benny seemed to me hardly worth the trouble, being a blackish man without shoes or cuffs, and anxious to surrender and throw himself on the commissary of his foe.