The two sat together for a time, and the little boy said, "Why didn't you go, Mr.Culpepper ?" And the man replied: "Me?
Oh--why--Oh, yes, I got a little scratch here in my leg, and they won't let me out of here.

There's Watts over there in the next cot; he got a little scratch too--didn't you, Watts ?" Watts and the boy smiled at each other, but John did not see Bob again for years.

Miss Hendricks came and took him to their father's people in Ohio.
One day some one came in the hospital where John and Watts and Martin Culpepper were lying, and began to call out mail for the men, and the third name the corporal called was "Captain Martin Culpepper"; and when they brought him a long official envelope with General Fremont's name on it, Martin Culpepper held it in his hands, looked at the inscription, read the word "captain" again and again, and could not speak for choked joy.

And tears so dimmed his eyes that he could not see the "large white plumes" of chivalry, but the men in the beds cheered as they heard the words the corporal read.
With such music as that in his ears, and with his soul stirred by the events about him, Watts McHurdie, lying in the hospital, wrote the song that made him famous.

They know in Sycamore Ridge that Watts is not much of a poet, that his rhymes are sometimes bad and his metre worse.