THREE:"I say, Shorty," said Si, coming down to where that worthy was stationed, "what d' you think o' the boys now? They take to this like a duck to water. They think it's more fun than squirrel-huntin'. Listen.""You don't have to worry," Dodd said. "Nobody's doing anything to her. Not right now, anyhow. Inot right now."
THREE:The Alberts in spite of a few fearful masters, had been issued Belbis tubes and fought valiantly with them; the batteries did everything expected of them, and the sky was lit with supernal flashes of blinding color throughout one hard-fought night. Dodd himself, carrying a huge Belbis beam, braced himself against the outer wall of Building One and played the beam like a hose on any evidence of Confederation ships up there in the lightning-lit sky: he felt only like a robot, doing an assigned and meaningless job, and it was only later that he realized he had been shivering all the time he had used the killing beam. As far as he could tell he had hit nothing at all.
THREE:"No, you can't see the General today," he would say to a man as to whom he had heard the General or the Chief Clerk hint was a bore, and wasted their time. "The General's very busy. The President's layin' down on him for his advice about a campaign to take Richmond by a new way, and the General's got to think at the rate of a mile a minute in order to git it off by telegraph.""Your muscle," said Shorty, satirically. "You've got about as much muscle now as a musketo. But you're good stuff all the same, and you're goin' to everlastingly lick the rebels when the time comes. I only wisht I was here to help you do it. I don't think I'll go any further than Nashville. I'll be well enough to come back by that time. I'll see Si and his father off safely, and then gether up a crowd of other convalescents, and come back and clean the rebels off your cracker line."
