@@@@@They harnessed themselves again to the
@@@@@They harnessed themselves again to the litter and trudged forward
"You're a good bunch of men, they ain't anybody better'n you two menAt the moment, still enmeshed in the first pangs of setting out again, they hated him
"It's all right," Goldstein said
"Naw, Ah mean it, they ain't any two men like you to be found in the whole fuggin platoon He was silent, and they settled into the stupefaction of the marchWilson was delirious for a while, and then sober againHis wound began to ache and he abused them, screaming once more with pain
Now it bothered Ridges more than GoldsteinHe had not thought very much about the agony of the march; it was something he had assumed was natural, perhaps a little more extreme than any work he had ever done, but he had learned when he was very young that work was what a man did with most of his day and it was pointless to wish to do anything elseIf it was uncomfortable, if it was painful, there was nothing you could do about itHe had been given the job and he was going to do itBut now for the first time he hated it genuinelyPerhaps there had been too many fatigue-products, perhaps the cumulative labor had dissolved and reshaped the structures of his mind, but in any case he was wretched with this work, and as a corollary he understood suddenly that he had always hated the drudgery of his farm work, the unending monotonous struggle against an arid unyielding soil
It was too much of a realization; he had to retreat from itAnd that was not difficultHe was not accustomed to threshing out a solution with his mind, and now he was too blunted, too completely tiredThe thought had come into his head, exploded, and shaken a great many patterns, but the smoke had cleared quickly, and there was nothing now but a vague uncomfortable sense of some wreckage, some changeA few minutes later he was merely uneasy; he knew he had thought something sacrilegious, but what it was he could not guessHe was fastened to his load again
But this was mixed with something elseHe had not forgotten that he had given Wilson the water, and he remembered the way Wilson had said, "Ah'm burnin' They were carrying a man who was already lost, and that meant somethingHe was made a little uneasy by the idea that they might be contaminated by him, but that really was not what bothered himThe ways of the Lord are dev'us