Page:War; or, What happens when one loves one's enemy, John Luther Long, 1913.djvu/186

WAR "That the sooner one of us enlists the better. That will take all this watching and threatening and suspicion away. Some of our kind secessionist neighbors are giving us entirely too much attention. And I suppose many things we do innocently add confirmation. Even the night-watching, for purely honest reasons, has probably been the worst thing we could have done. The Union pickets take it for something entirely different. And something disloyal, no doubt—such as protecting the work of the Knights and sympathizers.

As we passed old Jake Kimmelwasser's house, he was sitting on the porch all dressed up in the uniform he had worn in Mexico. He had got a wound in the head at Chapultepec and was crazy. Every time they raised a new company, Union or Confederate, he enlisted and then went home to bed and forgot it. Now he came running out, and, like we—Jon and me—was a whole regiment, he drilled us clear into the town—making us march and countermarch, wheel and oblique—till he fell 170