Si and Shorty rose promptly, and, experienced campaigners as they were, were in a moment ready to march anywhere or do anything as long as their rations and their cartridges held out."Well, that's enough. I don't want money so much as the right kind of a man. Put up your stuff, and I'll let you in cahoots with me, and we'll make a bar'l o' money out o' these new troops that'll begin coming down this week."And so they set outon a walk long enough to serve as an aboriginal Odyssey for the planet. The night-beasts, soft glowing circles of eyes and mouths which none of their race had ever seen before: the giant flesh-eating plants: the herd of bovine monsters which, confused, stampeded at them, shaking the ground with their tread and making the feathery trees shake as if there were a hurricane: all this might have made an epic, had there been anyone to record it. But Cadnan expected no more and no less: the world was strange. Any piece of it was as strange as any other.
ONE:"Le's go down and see the Surgeon," insisted Si.
ONE:"Gracious! going to shoot the rebels with their own bullets," remarked Monty, who had nearly recovered, and came up pluckily to take his place in the ranks. "Isn't that great medicine! How I should like to pop one into that fellow that belted me with that bowlder.""But we enlisted to fight and march, and" interjected Harry.
THREE:What they had been taught was, at any rate, English of a sort, bearing within it the seeds of a more complex tongue, and having its roots far back in the pre-space centuries, when missionaries had first begun to visit strange lands. Men had called it pidgin and Beche-le-mer and a hundred different names in a hundred different variations. Here, the masters called it English. The Alberts called it words, and nothing more.
The operator wrote out his last version of the message on a telegraph-blank, inclosed it in a West ern union envelope, which he addressed to Deacon Klegg, and gave to Abraham Lincoln, with strong injunctions to make all haste back home with it.Somewhere his mind continued to think, but the thoughts were powerless and very small. He felt the girl's hands on his shoulders, trying to hold him, and masked by the sounds of his own weeping he heard her voice, too:Cadnan, by this time, was nearly paralyzed with fright. He sat very still. The elders continued, in a slow, leaden chorus:
