fancied most of all—­a sort of thick dough cakes we called sinkers.  As luck would have it I got into trouble about this time—­a little matter of two silver candle-sticks and a Virgin’s crown—­and Benny sent for Captain Howard (it was him that commanded the battery), and weak as he was, dying, he begged me off, and the captain swore awful to hide how bad he felt, and struck my name off the sheet to please him.  There was little enough to do in this line, for it was plain as day where Benny was bound for, and he knew himself he would never see that little home in Oakland again.

Well, he got worse and worse, and sometimes when I went there he didn’t know me, being out of his head or kind of dopy with the doctor’s stuff, the shadow being over him, as Irish people say.  One night he was that low that I got scared, and I waylaid the contract surgeon as he came out.

“Doctor,” I said, “it’s all up with Benny, ain’t it?”

“He’ll never hear reveille no more,” he says.

I got my blanket and lay outside the door, it being against regulations for any of us to be in the field-hospital after taps.  But the orderly said he’d call me if Benny was to wake up before the end, and the doctor promised me I might go in.  Sure enough, I was called somewheres along of four o’clock and the orderly led me inside the tent to Benny’s cot.  There was no light but a candle in a bottle, and I held it in my hand and bent over and looked in Benny’s face.  He was himself all right, and he put his cold, sweaty hand in mine and pressed it.

“Do you know me, old man?” I said.  “Do you know me?”

“Good-bye, Bill,” he said, and then, as I leaned over him, his voice being that low and faint—­he whispered:  “Billy, I guess you’ll have to rustle for another chum!”

Them was his last words and he said them with a kind of a smile, like he was happy and didn’t give a damn to live.  Then the little life he had left went out.  The orderly looked at his watch, and then wrote the time on a slate after Benny’s regimental number and the word:  “died.”  This was about all the epitaph he got, though we buried him properly in the morning and gave him the usual send-off.  Then his effects was auctioned off in front of the captain’s tent, a nickel for this, ten cents for that—­a soldier hasn’t much at any time, you know, and on the march less than a little—­and five-sixty about covered the lot.  There was quite a rush for the picture of his best girl, but I bought it in, along with one of his Ma and a one-pound Hotchkiss shell and the hilt of a Spanish officer’s sword; and when I had laid them away in my haversack and had borrowed a sheet of paper and an envelope from the commissary sergeant to write to Benny’s mother, it came over me what a little place a man fills in the world and how things go on much the same without him.