• did not have the courage to do so.

“Well, sir, if that ain’t th’ derndest thing! I never thought Fred Collins had the blood in him for that kind of business.”

"The regiment gave him a welcoming roar. The grimed faces were wrinkled in laughter."

• Even the colonel is surprised by his act and believes it to be foolhardy, because he thinks that it would be impossible for him to succeed.

The colonel was watching Collins’s face. “Look here, my lad,” he said, in a pious sort of a voice—“look here, my lad”—Collins was not a lad—“don’t you think that’s taking pretty big risks for a little drink of water?”

• Collins took the other men's canteens with him when instructed to do so, which would increase the risk. The extra weight would slow him down. Even though his motive was initially selfish and borne out of pride, he was brave enough to follow through.

"He had blindly been led by quaint emotions, and laid himself under an obligation to walk squarely up to the face of death."

• When the injured artillery officer asked him for a drink, Collins at first ran on but then, risking death, he turned back to help the fallen man.

'But Collins turned. He came dashing back. His face had now turned gray and in his eyes was all terror. “Here it is! here it is!”'

• Collins did something that went against his very nature, as the text indicates:

"...he remembered borrowing fifteen dollars from a friend and promising to pay it back the next day, and then avoiding that friend for ten months. When at home his mother had aroused him for the early labor of his life on the farm, it had often been his fashion to be irritable, childish, diabolical;..."

• It was not Collins' intention to be a hero and he did not see himself as one.

"He was not a hero. Heroes had no shames in their lives..."

• The story describes Collins' fear throughout the story. In spite of it, he completed his task. He was prepared to face death or serious injury to complete what others believed was an unnecessary and foolish errand.

• In terms of the second definition Collins is, most obviously, the protagonist and we do sympathize with him; despite his character flaws (being stubborn and foolish), we admire that he did what he had promised to do and faced extreme adversity to do so.

Collins might not be a perfect or a 'real' hero, but he is a hero nonetheless. He had met the requirements for what one would deem a hero, as the text states:

He wondered why he did not feel some keen agony of fear cutting his sense like a knife. He wondered at this, because human expression had said loudly for centuries that men should feel afraid of certain things, and that all men who did not feel this fear were phenomena—heroes. He was, then, a hero. He suffered that disappointment which we would all have if we discovered that we were ourselves capable of those deeds which we most admire in history and legend. This, then, was a hero. After all, heroes were not much.