There was nothing too good for the old lady after that, and the captain wouldn’t hear of her living anywheres but at the officers’ mess, where she sat at his right hand, and always spoke first.  The Queen of England couldn’t have been treated with more respeck, and the captain put her on the strength of the battery, and she drew back-pay from the day she first blew into camp.  My, but it was changed times! and you ought to have seen the way the old lady cocked her head in the air and made a splendid black silk dress of loot, which she wore every evening with the officers and rattled all over with jet.  But it didn’t turn her head the least bit, like for a time the boys feared it might, and she was twice as good to us as she had been before.  We had a pull at headquarters now, and she had a heart that big that it could hold the officers and us, too—­and more in the draw.

The tide had turned her way when she needed it most, for, tough as she was, she could not have long gone on like she had been.  She had worn down very thin, and was like a shadow of the old lady I remembered in Oakland, California, and kind of sunk in around the eyes, and I don’t believe Benny would have known her, had he risen from the grave; and, when anybody joked with her about it, and said:  “Take it easy, Ma’am, you owe it to the battery to be keerful,” she’d answer she had enlisted for the term of the war, and looked to peg out the day peace was proclaimed.

“Then I’ll be off to join Benny,” she’d say, “and the rest of the battery, in heaven!”

There was getting to be a good deal of a crowd up there—­that is, if the other place hadn’t yanked them in—­and some of the boys found a lot of comfort in her way of thinking.

“A boy as dies for his country isn’t going to be bothered about passing in,” she would say, with a click of her teeth and that sure way of hers like she knew.  And I, reckon perhaps she did.

One afternoon she was suddenly taken very bad; and, instead of better, she grew worse and worse, being tied to the bed and raving; and the captain, who wouldn’t hear of her being sent to hospital, give up his own quarters to her and almost went crazy, he was that frightened she was dying.

“It’s just grit that’s kep’ her alive,” I heard the doctor saying to him.

“You must save her, Marcus,” said the captain, holding to him, like he was pleading with the doctor for her life.  “You must save her, Marcus.  You must do everything in the world you can, Marcus.”

The contract surgeon looked mighty glum.  “She’s like a ship that’s been burning up her fittings for lack of coal,” said he.  “There ain’t nothing left,” he said.  “Not a damn thing,” said he, and then he piled in a lot of medical words that seemed to settle the matter.