ud, Bud, and it was he who had dropped his bayonet.
Anxious, nervous with the desire to please them, perhaps with a shade
too much of thought of them looking on with their hearts in their eyes,
he had fumbled, and lost all that he was striving for. His head went
round and round and all seemed black before him.

He executed the movements in a dazed way. The applause, generous and
sympathetic, as his company left the parade ground, came to him from
afar off, and like a wounded animal he crept away from his comrades, not
because their reproaches stung him, for he did not hear them, but
because he wanted to think what his mother and "Little Sister" would
say, but his misery was as nothing to that of the two who sat up there
amid the ranks of the blue and white holding each other's hands with a
despairing grip. To Bud all of the rest of the contest was a horrid
nightmare; he hardly knew when the three companies were marched back to
receive the judges' decision. The applause that greeted Company "B" when
the blue ribbons were pinned on the members' coats meant nothing to his
ears. He had disgraced himself and his company. What would his mother
and his "Little Sister" say?

To Hannah and "Little Sister," as to Bud, all of the remainder of the
drill was a misery. The one interest they had had in it failed, and not
even the dropping of his gun by one of Company "E" when on the march,
halting in line, could raise their spirits. The little girl tried to be
brave, but when it was all over she was glad to hurry out before the
crowd got started and to hasten away home. Once there and her tears
flowed freely; she hid her face in her mother's dress, and sobbed as if
her heart would break.

"Don't cry, Baby! don't cry, Lammie, dis ain't da las' time da wah goin'
to be a drill. Bud'll have a chance anotha time and den he'll show 'em
somethin'; bless you, I spec' he'll be a captain." But this consolation
of philosophy was nothing to "Little Sister." It was so terrible to her,
this failure of Bud's. She couldn't blame him, she couldn't blame anyone
else, and she had not yet learned to lay all such unfathomed
catastrophes at the door of fate. What to her was the thought of another
day; what did it matter to her whether he was a captain or a private?
She didn't even know the meaning of the words, but "Little Sister," from
the time she knew Bud was a private, knew that that was much better than
being captain or any of those other things wit