Part 25 (1/2)

There had been no time to feel or know anything.

Joseph Kerrigan had merely stepped through a doorway into eternity.

”Joseph? Can you hear me?” Feeny said.

He knew there would be no answer.

More alone in the midst of a roaring battlefield than he had ever felt in his most solitary moments, Feeny was used up. Every man has a limit, and he'd reached his.

His panic became mindless and he pushed Kerrigan's mutilated corpse away from him.

Against all the dictates of logic and common sense, Feeny turned to run as if he could outpace the flying bullets chasing him.

He could not, of course.

Feeny felt something like a sledgehammer crash into the small of his back, and he pitched forward, momentum slamming his face hard into the bloodstained earth. He groaned, tried to stand, and felt a searing pain in his right leg. Looking down, he saw a nightmare of blood and shattered bone before he collapsed onto the ground.

Then all went quiet and still and he neither saw nor heard.

For Michael Feeny, late of County Mayo, Ireland, the Battle of s.h.i.+loh, just aborning into history, was over.

J. A. Johnstone on William W. Johnstone ”Print the Legend”

William W. Johnstone was born in southern Missouri, the youngest of four children. He was raised with strong moral and family values by his minister father, and tutored by his schoolteacher mother. Despite this, he quit school at age fifteen.

”I have the highest respect for education,” he says, ”but such is the folly of youth, and wanting to see the world beyond the four walls and the blackboard.”

True to this vow, Bill attempted to enlist in the French Foreign Legion (”I saw Gary Cooper in Beau Geste when I was a kid and I thought the French Foreign Legion would be fun”) but was rejected, thankfully, for being underage. Instead, he joined a traveling carnival and did all kinds of odd jobs. It was listening to the veteran carny folk, some of whom had been on the circuit since the late 1800s, telling amazing tales about their experiences, that planted the storytelling seed in Bill's imagination.