... long stay. We said little of what we had gone through, outside the small office at headquarters, but somehow it began to travel, passing quickly from mouth to mouth, until it got to the newspapers and began to stir the tongue of each raw recruit. General Brown was there that evening, and had for me, as always, the warm heart of a father. He heard our ... — D'Ri and I • Irving Bacheller
... stared death; not hot, sudden death, but nihility, cool, deliberate, that waited for one! The big beads on his forehead gathered in drops and ran down his cheeks. He tried to move on, but his legs only trembled beneath him. The hopeless, unreasoning terror of the frightened animal, the raw recruit, the superstitious negro, was upon him. The last fragment of self-respect, of bravado even, was in tatters. No object on earth, no fear of hereafter, could have made him face death in that way, with those ... — A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge