Read "A Lieutenant at Eighteen" by Oliver Optic online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Lieutenant Ripley returned from the conference with the riflemen, and reported that thirty of them were willing to enlist in such an organization as that proposed; the others were unable to reply until they had been home to their families. The lieutenant was confident that he could raise the sixty proposed as a beginning within a reasonable time, and the colonel had a similar confidence in the patriotism of the loyal Kentuckians in that part of the State.
The men had finished their dinners, the prisoners had been paroled with the approval of Major Lyon, who was beginning to be in a hurry to march back to Jamestown as soon as the first company had rested from the hard work of the day; and there had been much more of it than could be indicated in the narrative of the principal events.