CHAPTER VI

THE CHUMS

“I saw you go in,” hailed the boy, “and I was laying for you. I didn’t want to go in there with you because I’m not very popular with father to-day. What’s the matter, Dad? You look all done up.”

The little fellow slipped a grubby hand into his grandfather’s and looked up at him in genuine concern.

There was nothing of the Lord Fauntleroy, grandpa-lean-on-me element about Jimmie Brinton. Short enough to merit the loathed title of Runt, he was stocky and deep of chest. His hair grew in very red and very bristly formation. His face was plenteously freckled, his mouth rather large, and his eyes a palish green.

In repose his face was positively ugly. But then, neither Jimmie Brinton nor Jimmie Brinton’s face was ever long in repose. And there was an elfin charm about the unbeautiful youngster.

“I’m feeling all right, thanks, Jimmie,” returned Dad, as together they made for the square. “At least, as all right as a man can hope to when he’s taking medicine he hates and that is the only medicine due to cure him.”

“Has father been lecturing you again?”

“No. Just showing me my duty. He’s a wise man, your father, Jimmie. Where he gets it from I don’t know. Sometimes he’s so wise it hurts. At least, it hurts foolisher folks like me. I’m coming to live at your house after Thursday.”

“I know,” said the boy with a queer constraint. “Mother told me.”

“Aren’t you glad?” asked Dad, wondering at the lad’s unusual tone.

“Yes,” said Jimmie briefly. “Of course I am. But I’m not glad for you. You’ll try not to mind too much the way mother acts, won’t you?”

“You mustn’t talk that way, son.”

“Oh, I’m not kicking at how she treats me. I like her a lot. Only she doesn’t seem to know what a brick you are. And it kind of riles me.”

“Oh, that’ll be all different now,” prophesied Dad. “She’s changed her mind about me. If she hadn’t, would she be wanting me to come up to the big house to live and to take charge of everything and look after you and her while Joe’s away, fighting for his country?”

“H-m!” observed the boy, non-committally.

“Of course she wouldn’t,” declared his grandfather. “We’ll have a good time up there, won’t we?”

“H-m!” repeated Jimmie.

“What’s the matter with you, son?” demanded the old man. “You look and act as glum as bill day. Have things been going wrong? You said something about not being popular with Joe.”

“Oh, that?” said Jimmie, eagerly seizing the chance of escape. “That’s so. It’s nothing much. I was reading in the _Herald_ this morning how Professor Garfield up at Hiram College is raising a regiment of college fellers. And I told father that when a man gets to be pretty near fifteen it’s time he was thinking of joining some such regiment as that. He talked to me more than ten minutes without stopping. And then mother took a turn at talking.

“They didn’t leave very much of me. They said I’m ungrateful and lazy and undisciplined and a lot of other things. But I wouldn’t have minded all that so much, only--”

“Only what?”

“Nothing.”

“Only they said,” supplemented Dad, “that it was I who put those notions into your head by my gas-bag yarns about the Mexican war and the way I feel about what a man owes as a duty to his country.”

“Did father tell you all that?” asked the boy quickly. “How mean of him!”

“I’ve heard it before,” evaded Dad. “And the worst of it is, it’s true.”

“It isn’t!” vehemently denied Jimmie.

“Yes, it is, son. Not that my ideas about patriotism aren’t all right. And a man who has risked his life is sure entitled to tell about those risks. But I had no right to fill your mind with ideas of war when you ought to be thinking about ciphering and grammar and--”

“What’s the use of school, anyway?” broke out Jimmie. “I’ll learn more in one month at the war than I’d get in a year at school.”

“That’s where you’re mistaken, son. We both want to do big things. But the manager has cast us for little unimportant rôles. And if we’re yellow dogs we’ll sulk over those rôles and neglect ’em and do our feeble best to spoil the whole show. But if we’re the kind of chaps I think we are, Jimmie, you and I will just whirl in and play those two measly little rôles as if they were leading parts and as if the whole theater were applauding us. Sha’n’t we?”

The boy squeezed his hand encouragingly, but made no reply.

“You see,” went on Dad, “you’ve got a heap better chance than I have. You’re due to be the lead some day. And the better you play the little no-account parts that are handed out to you now, the sooner you’ll be one. But I’m getting a littler rôle each year.”

“It’s a shame!”

“Most things are. But white men grin and bear it. I was foolish enough to want to go to the war. But your father has shown me where my duty lies. So while he’s down South there, putting a new polish on the old fighting Brinton name, I’m going to make things easier for him by staying here and taking care of the folks he loves. It isn’t such a poor rôle if I can play it right.

“Look!” he broke off, pointing to the nearer of the two drilling companies in strong disfavor. “See how those fellows are doing the ‘double!’ It’s a crime. That step will shake the backbones out of them and knock out their strength and ginger in half a mile. What fool of a drillmaster is that, anyhow, not to teach them to come down on the ball of the foot when they double? They’re as flat-footed as a batch of Digger Indians. Why, down in Mexico, we could keep at the double for three miles without getting winded.”

“And didn’t the greasers who were chasing you get winded either?” asked Jimmie in ponderous innocence.

Dad pulled one of the boy’s outstanding ears with finely simulated fury, grinning broadly in spite of himself at the pert question.

“No, son,” he said. “It was the other way around. The best army will have to run sometimes. But down there, under Zach Taylor, it just happened that we did all our running forward. Even at Buena Vista, where they were five to our one.

“Lad, I’ll never forget that day while there’s a wheeze of breath left in me. We woke up in the morning after a big rain. We were all sopping and chilled. And we found the greasers had made a forced march, and that they’d hemmed us in the big hacienda where we were camped. They had us right in the hollow of their hands. Five to one. And all the advantage of position, too, do you see?

“Old Uncle Zach was sitting on a soap-box in front of his tent, trying to mow a week’s beard with a dull razor. He was barefoot, and in a pair of butternut pants and a red undershirt. Up rides a tailor’s dummy of a Mexican adjutant, under a flag of truce. Looked as if he’d been born in a bandbox. He salutes, haughty like, and asks:

“‘Do I address El Comandante Zaccaria Taylor?’

“‘Uh-huh’ grunts Taylor, scraping away hopeless like at his stiff gray stubble.

“‘The illustrious Generalissimo Santa Anna bids me say to you,’ goes on the tailor’s dummy, ‘that you are irretrievably in his power.’

“‘All right,’ says Uncle Zach, tugging at his razor. ‘Let him come along, then, and get me, if that’s the case. I’m right here.’

“Half an hour later they charged us. It looked like a million-to-one shot, with no takers. Along toward afternoon, when we’d been fighting till we were half-dead, a staff officer said to me:

“‘Taylor’s been beaten to a standstill no less than three times to-day!’

“‘Yes,’ said I, grinning back at him; ‘but he doesn’t know it.’

“And no more he did. By night the Mexican army was smashed like a basket of eggs that have fallen under a road roller.

“That’s the whole secret, son--not to know when you’re licked. Maybe a man can put up as pretty a fight, in his own way, right here at home, as if he were riding a white horse and waving a thirty-dollar sword. I’m going to try to, anyhow.”

“If it’s good enough for you, Dad,” sighed the boy, “I guess it’s good enough for me. We’ll make a try at it, anyhow.”

“That’s the hero-talk,” approved his grandfather. “We’ll be General Jimmie and Colonel Dad. And each evening we’ll have a military conference, and report to each other the day’s victories and reverses. Let’s see if we can’t make it a line of victories as unbroken as Uncle Zach’s, down in Mexico. The crowd won’t be cheering us; but something clear down inside of us will. Shall we try?”

The boy drew himself up at attention.

“I approve your plan, colonel!” he rasped out, military fashion. “It is worthy of the man who helped Uncle Zach lick the greasers. We’re going to win out on this campaign. Take your post, sir, and report to me this evening.”