Rifles for Watie by Harold Keith Page A

always go farther than you think you can. This is pretty hard, but we can stand it.”
    The sergeant was right. Jeff had learned in his training marches across the Missouri that fatigue is mostly mental. Browned by the Kansas sunshine, his body was wiry and tough. He felt as if he could keep going all day.
    Every time the column stopped to rest, Millholland reached over and, with a powerful tug of his right hand, helped ease the heavy pack off Jeff’s small back. Each soldier was carrying about forty pounds—his musket, canteen of water, haversack of rations, a twenty-pound knapsack and forty rounds of ammunition, besides the heavy shoes on his feet and the clothes on his back. Jeff should have been grateful for the assistance. Instead, he felt embarrassed.
    â€œThank you, sir,” he told the sergeant. “I can heft it.” Millholland gave him such a dark, glowering look that from then on he accepted the sergeant’s aid in resentful silence.
    â€œWisht I had me a cavalry hoss,” John Chadwick said enviously. “Them fly-slicers shore got it easy.”
    â€œNot as easy as the batterymen,” said Ford Ivey, switching his rifle from his right hand to his left. “Them wagon sojers always gits to ride.” The back of Ford’s blue cotton shirt was stained dark with perspiration. Ivey upped his canteen and took a long pull of the water. His Adam’s apple oscillated as he drank.
    Tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp. Soon the sun was almost directly overhead. The heat was searing. Jeff felt every tissue in his body was being wrung dry. He knew the horses must need water, too, but they hadn’t passed a pond or stream for miles. Tramp, tramp, tramp. Now their marching footsteps were slower. The sun began to slant westerly, behind them and over their right shoulders. They passed a meadowlark sitting on a rail fence, gasping with its bill open. The heat came up through the soles of Jeff’s brogans, burning his feet. In the hot south wind the roadside grass rippled in long waves. Wheels rolled, wagons creaked. Canteens flashed in the burning sunshine as the men drank heavily during the rest stops.
    They seemed to suffer more from drinking too much water than from lack of it.
    â€œJest take a sip,” advised Millholland. “Don’t drink too much. It’ll make you sick.”
    But not all the thirsty Kansans accepted his counsel. Three boys in Jeff’s company guzzled too deeply and had to drop out and be picked up by the ambulances. It was on the third day of the march that Jeff discovered with surprise how much water a single company could drink.
    â€œHere’s water,” somebody had called, and without waiting for the officers to give the command, the soldiers broke ranks, hurrying through the dusty woods. Carrying little ropes and buckets, they crowded around a farmer’s stone well near the road.
    Jeff got one good drink and filled his canteen, then watched incredulously as his company scooped water so busily that soon all splashing ceased, and all he could hear was their empty buckets scraping the well’s rock bottom. It was the first time he had ever seen a well drained in fifteen minutes.
    Refreshed, the crawling column again was put in motion. Jeff noticed that Noah Babbitt, the tramp printer walking next to him, swung along easily and effortlessly and seemed to be standing the heat quite well.
    â€œHow come you like to walk so well, Noah? Don’t you ever get a hankering to straddle a horse?” he asked.
    Babbitt shook his shaggy head. “Ridin’ makes my head dizzy and my feet sore. I’d rather walk. I like to touch the earth, eat haws, smell the wheat, an’ mingle with the quails, bluejays, and woodpeckers in God’s great outdoors.”
    Jeff blinked with surprise. Noah was certainly an odd one. Always pausing to finger and study the leaves of some tree he did not know, or stooping to inspect some wild flower, or