When you hear the flip-flop of giant membranes,
and the faraway chatter of inhuman jaws....
When you see a winged shape larger than any
creature that flies.... You may know that “The
Flying Horned One” is abroad—and that the
gates of hell are open!
far back. Passing a headquarters, I saw a fateful little man with a big cigar—General Grant. With him was a taller, red-whiskered man, who was crying. Someone said he was Sherman, but Sherman never seemed to me like a man who would cry over any sorrow, his own or another’s.
This introduction is jumbled. So was my mind at the time. I must have looked forlorn, a skinny gray-clad trooper plundered of saber, carbine and horse. One of the big blue cavalrymen who escorted the prisoners, leaned down from his saddle and rubbed the heel of his hand on my feebly fuzzy cheek.
“Little Johnny Reb’s growing some nice black whiskers to surprise his sweetheart,” he said, laughing.
“I haven’t got a sweetheart,” I snapped, trying to sound like a big soldier. But he laughed the louder.
“Hear that, boys?” he hailed the others of the escort. “This little feller never had a sweetheart.” They mingled their cackles with his, and I wished I’d not spoken. They repeated my words again and again, tagging on sneers and merriments. I frowned, and tried not to cry. This was at dusk, the saddest time of day. We’d been marched back for miles, to some sort of reserve concentration in a tiny town.
“We’ve robbed the cradle for sure,” the big blue cavalryman was saying to friends he met. “This little shaver—no sweetheart, he says!”
A new gale of laughter from towering captors all around me. It hushed suddenly at a stern voice:
“Bring that prisoner to me.”
He rolled out from between two sheds, as heavily and smoothly as a gun-limber.
He was a short, thick man in a dragoon jacket and one of those little peaked Yankee caps. There was just enough light to show me his big beard and the sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve.
“Bring him along,” he ordered again. “March the others to the stockade.”
A moment later, he and I stood alone in
5
