Once an Eagle by Anton Myrer

be a sin and a shame to see you get mixed up with that bunch of tinhorn crooks, and so young in life at that.” He scratched his chin with a thumbnail. “It isn’t like the Hanlons to be secretive about such matters, I’ll say that much.”
    â€œLeave him alone, Billy,” Kitty Damon said. “He’s old enough to know what he wants, and that’s more than you can say.”
    â€œAt eighteen? At eighteen you’re the prize gull at the carnival.”
    â€œWell, you’re not looking at any gull,” Sam answered tartly; he rose to his feet holding the letter.
    â€œIt’s all part of his secret scheme to set the world on fire,” Peg put in slyly, grinning at him. “Honestly, I’ve never seen such a sneak …”
    â€œLeave him alone, Peg,” his mother repeated. Her sharp blue eyes rested on him a moment, dropped again to her sewing; he knew she had read his bitter disappointment. Quietly he went upstairs to his room …
    Now, back of third base, Traprock Merrick clapped his hands. He was a squat block of a man with little button eyes and a mouth that made a huge black square when he shouted. He was pugnacious, harsh, given to much taunting of subordinates, and he was riding Kintzelman hard, shouting that he was all through, his arm had turned to blue glass, they were going to beat him right now, the way they always had. Jumbo stared at him a moment doggedly, then turned back to the plate. The batter, a lanky, round-shouldered Kentuckian named Cloren, drove the next pitch down the third-base line. Devlin darted to his right, leaped headlong, hit rolling in the dust and came up with the liner held high. The A Company crowd yelled and Sam whistled shrilly between his teeth. Old Dev. What a save.
    The next hitter was already standing in, waving his bat. Kintzelman turned and waved Sam farther toward right field. Sam drifted over a few steps until Jumbo appeared satisfied, then spat in the base of his glove and worked it in with two fingers of his throwing hand, his feet spread, waiting.
    â€¦The following year. He had sat at Mr. Thornton’s desk, weary from his day’s work in the fields, listening absently to the shrill of katydids in the swamp, opening and closing his hands. It was impossible to keep his mind on the battle of Austerlitz. A full year. Matt Bullen might change his mind or forget about him entirely, he could even be defeated in November; Uncle Bill might succumb to wanderlust again—run off gold mining in the Yukon or hunting for sunken treasure in the Caribbean—and Sam would find himself carrying most of the load again. Anything could happen in a year. One day his father had been a healthy, vigorous man: a few weeks later he was minus a leg and wasted away to a shadow, his face the color of dirty flannel; a dying man. If you didn’t force the issue, snatch at life when you could, it would turn on you like a snake. Sitting at the head of the stairs listening to the drone of voices down in the bar, impatience would catch him up and shake him like violent hands. You had to act, to act—
    So he did what he had always done since he’d been a little boy: he acted quickly and without reservation. He took the Union Pacific train to Lincoln still again, and enlisted in the United States Army. Ability would tell: he would work his way up through the ranks, he would make a name for himself even before the year was up. Every soldier carried a field marshal’s baton in his knapsack: hadn’t the greatest self-made soldier of them all said so?
    The recruiting sergeant, a tall Texan with a low forehead and a broad, engaging smile, was delighted with him. He’d make a first-rate soldier, he could promise him that. Advancement was rapid, it was a slick army, an expanding army—they were going to war with Mexico any day now, and then you’d see the fur fly. And he’d passed the West Point exams, had he?