CHAPTER II.

WHEN Bootles showed his face in the mess-room the following morning he was greeted by such a volley of chaff as would have driven a more nervous man, or one less of a favorite than himself, to despair. Already the story had gone the round of the barracks, and Bootles found the greater part of his brother officers ready and willing to take Miles’s view of the affair, whether in chaff or downright good earnest he could not say.

“Halloo! Bootles, my man,” shouted one when he entered, “what’s this story we hear? Is it possible that Bootles—our immaculate and philanthropical Bootles— Oh, Bootles! Bootles! how are the mighty fallen!”

“Hey?” inquired Bootles, sweetly.

“I wouldn’t have believed it of you, Bootles; I wouldn’t indeed. Any other fellow in the regiment—that soft-headed Lacy grinning over there, for instance—but _our Bootles_—” He broke off as if words could not express the volumes he thought, but found his tongue and went on again before Bootles could open his mouth. “Our Bootles with an unacknowledged wife sworn not to disclose her marriage—our Bootles with a baby—our Bootles a papa! Oh lor!”

“Why didn’t you manage better, Bootles?” cried another. “You might have sent her an odd fiver now and then. You have plenty.”

“Is she pretty, Bootles?” asked a third.

“Was there by any chance a flaw in the marriage?” inquired a fourth.

“Do you think I’m a fool?” asked Bootles, pleasantly. “I tell you it’s a plant. I know nothing about the creature.”

“Just my view,” struck in Miles. “Just what I said last night. It’s absurd, you know, to expect him to own it. No fellow would. Besides, does Bootles look like the father of a fine bouncing baby that goes ‘Chucka, chucka, chuck?’ It’s absurd, you know.”

Even Bootles joined in the laugh which followed, and Miles continued:

“The only thing is—and it really is awkward for Bootles—the extraordinary likeness. Blue eyes, golden hair, fair complexion. I should say myself”—looking at his comrade critically, “that at the same age Bootles was just such a baby as that which turned up so mysteriously last night.”

“That’s as may be. Any way, the youngster is not mine,” said Bootles, emphatically; “and what to do with the little beggar _I_ don’t know.”

“Send it back to its mother,” suggested Dawson.

“But I don’t know who the mother is,” Bootles answered, impatiently.

“Oh no; so you say. Well, then, the brat must have growed, like Topsy. If I were you I should send it to the police-station.”

“The police-station? Oh no; hang it all, the poor little beggar has done nothing to start the world in that way,” Bootles answered.

“Did any of you,” asked Miles of the general company, “ever hear of a chap called Solomon?”

“I—er—did,” answered Lacy, promptly. “His other name was—er—Fligg. The Reverend Solomon Fligg.”

“Oh, we’ve all heard of _him_! but I meant a rather more celebrated person. There is a story about him—I rather think it’s in Proverbs”—eliciting a yell of laughter. “Not Proverbs? Well, perhaps it’s in the Song of Solomon. It’s about two mothers, who each had a baby, and one of them managed to smother hers in the night, and finding it dead when she woke up in the morning, claimed the other baby. Of course the other woman kicked up a row, a regular shindy, and they came before Solomon to get the matter settled. ‘Both claim it,’ said he. ‘Oh, chop it in half, and let each have a share—’ But you all know the rest. How the real mother gave up her claim sooner than see the child halved. Now in this case, you see, Bootles hasn’t the heart to send the child off to the police-station, as he would if—”

“Here’s the colonel,” said some one at this point, and in less than two seconds he appeared.

“Why, Ferrers,” he said, “I’ve been hearing a queer tale about you.”

“Yes, sir,” said Bootles, dismally; “and where it will end _I_ don’t know! Here am I saddled—”

“Well, of course you know whether the child has any claim upon you—” the colonel began.

“Upon my honor it has not, colonel,” said Bootles, earnestly.

“Then that, of course, settles the question,” replied the colonel, with a frown at the grinning faces along the table. “I should send the child to the workhouse immediately.”

“The workhouse?” repeated Bootles, reflectively.

“I’ll bet any one a fiver he don’t,” murmured Miles to his neighbors.

“Not he. Madame la Mère knew what she was doing when she picked out Bootles. He’ll get one of the sergeants’ wives to look after it; see if he don’t.”

After the chief had left the room, Bootles continued his breakfast in silence, considering the two suggestions for the disposal of the child. Now, if the truth be told, Bootles had a horror of workhouses. He had gone deeply into the “Casual” question, and pitied a tramp from the very inmost recesses of his kind heart. It fairly made him sick to think of that bonny golden head growing up among the shorn and unlovely locks of a pauper brood—to think of the little soft fingers that had twined themselves so confidently about his own, and had picked at the embroideries of his mess waistcoat, being slapped by the matron, or set as soon as they should be strong enough to do coarse and hard work, to develop into the unnaturally widened and unkempt hand of a “Marchioness”—to think of that little dainty thing being nourished on skilly, or on whatever hard fare pauper children are fed—to think of that little aristocrat being brought up among the children of thieves and vagabonds!

“Oh, confound it all,” he broke out, “I _can’t_.”

“I never expected you could,” retorted Miles. “It wouldn’t be natural if you did.”

This time Bootles did not laugh; on the contrary, he looked up and regarded Miles with a grave and searching gaze, rather disconcerting to that quizzical young gentleman.

“Are you judging me out of your own bushel?” he asked.

“How? What do you mean?” Miles stammered.

“Do _you_ happen to know anything of the matter?” Bootles persisted.

“I? Oh no. On my honor I don’t.”

“Ah! As the colonel said just now, that settles the question. You’re a very witty fellow, Miles, very. I shouldn’t wonder, after a while, if you ain’t quite the sharp man of the regiment. Only your jokes are like the clown’s jokes at the circus—one gets to know them. They’re in this kind of way:

“‘Ever been in Paris, Mr. Lando?’

“‘Yes, of course, Bell.’

“‘Ever been in Vienna, Mr. Lando?’

“‘To be sure, Bell.’

“‘Ever been in Geneva, Mr. Lando?’

“‘Of course I have, Bell.’

“‘Ever been in jail, Mr. Lando?’

“Of course I have, Bell—at least—that’s to say—I mean—no, of course I haven’t.’

“‘Why, Mr. Lando, I _saw_ you there.’

“‘You saw me in jail, Bell? And what were you doing to see me?’

“Oh!’ grandly, ‘I was staying with the governor for the good of my ’ealth.’

“‘And hadn’t stealing a cow something to do with it, eh, Bell?’

“‘Yah. Who stole a watch?’

“‘A Jersey cow, eh, Bell?’

“Yah. What time is it, Mr. Lando?’

“‘Just about milking time, Bell, my friend.’

“It’s all very funny once, you know, Miles,” Bootles ended, disdainfully. “But when you’ve been to the circus half a dozen times you don’t see anything to laugh at, somehow.”

For grace’s sake Miles was obliged to laugh, for every one else roared, except Bootles, who went on speaking very gravely:

“I know it’s very amusing to make a joke of the affair, to say I know more about it than I will confess. I have told the colonel _on my honor_ that the child is not mine, nor do I know whose it is. If it were mine I should not have made the story public property—it’s not in reason that I should. My difficulty is what to do with it. The colonel suggests the workhouse, Dawson the police-station—one simply means the other, and I can’t bring me to do it. It is an awful thing for the child of a tramp or a thief to be reared in a workhouse—and this is no common person’s child. For anything I know it may belong to one of you.”

“That’s true enough,” observed a man who had not yet taken part in the discussion, except to laugh now and then. “But remember, Bootles, if you saddle yourself with the child you will have to go on with it. It will stick to you like a burr, and though we are all ready to accept your word of honor, the world may not be so. If you put the brat out to nurse in the regiment, the story may crop up years hence, just when you least desire or expect it; and, you know, a story—mixed and confused by time and repetition—about a deserted wife may come to have a very ugly sound about it. Now if, as the colonel suggests, you send the child to the workhouse, you wash your hands of the whole business. Then, again, if the brat is brought up in the regiment, with the _disadvantage_ of your protection, what will she be in twenty years’ time? Neither fish, flesh, nor good red herring. Far better the oblivion of pauperism than the distinction among the men of being Captain Ferrers’s—shall we say _protégée_?”

“Yes, there’s a great deal in that,” Bootles admitted. He had at all times a great respect for Harkness, and profound faith in the soundness of his judgment. He saw at once that any plan of bringing the child up among the married people of the regiment would not do, and yet—_the workhouse_.

He rose from the table and settled his forage cap upon his head. “I dare say you fellows will laugh at me,” he said, almost desperately, as he pulled the chin-strap over his mustache, “but I can’t condemn that helpless thing to the workhouse—I _can’t_, and that’s all about it. It seems to me,” he went on, rubbing the end of his whip on the back of a chair, and looking at no one—“it seems to me that the child’s future in this world and the next depends upon the course I take now. And you may laugh at me—I dare say you will,” he said, quite nervously for him—“but I shall get a proper nurse to take charge of it, and I shall keep it myself until some one turns up to claim it—or—or for good.”

[Picture: “I can’t condemn that helpless thing to the workhouse”]

Just then officers’-call sounded, and Bootles made a clean bolt of it, leaving his brother officers staring amazedly at one another. The first of them to make a move was Lacy—the first, too, to speak.

“Upon my soul,” said he, “Bootles is a devilish fine fellow; and, d— it all,” he added, getting very red, and scarcely drawling, in his intense rage of admiration, “if there were a few more fellows in the world like him, it would be a vewry diffewrent place to what it is.”