Part 2

Across from him the stable sergeant had turned on his back for another nap. Through the curtains, opened against the heat, Gray could see that young gentleman’s broad chest rising and falling slowly. The temptation and destiny were too strong for him. He bounced an orange on it, only to see it rebound through the window and to hear a deafening roar. The stable sergeant sat up, a hand on his chest and fire in his eyes. He blinked into the distorted face of the general, outside the window. The general was holding a hand to his left ear.

“Who threw that orange?” demanded the general.

“Wh-what orange, sir?”

“Don’t lie to me. It came out of this window.”

“I was asleep, sir. Something struck me on the chest. I didn’t see it, sir!”

Behind his curtains Sergeant Gray had been struggling into his trousers. He emerged now, slightly pale but determined.

“I threw it, sir,” he explained. “I had no idea—it bounced, sir.”

The general surveyed him grimly.

“It’s a curious thing, sergeant,” he said, “that when there is any deviltry going on in the Headquarters Troop I find you at the bottom of it. Report to me in my car at eight o’clock.”

Then he stalked away.

Down the car a sonorous bass spoke from behind a curtain: “The commanding general presents his compliments to Sergeant Gray, and will Sergeant Gray breakfast with him in his private car at eight o’clock?”

Sergeant Gray dressed hastily. There was the bitterness of despair in his heart, for he knew what was coming. He would have no twenty-three and a half hours’ leave, no theatres, no decent food, no girl. And over his head still that idiotic bet.

“Oh, hell!” he muttered, and started back.

The general was still in a very bad temper, and his left ear was swollen and purple. He lost no time in the attack—he believed in striking swiftly and hard—and he read off, from an excellent memory, the tale of Sergeant Gray’s various sins of commission. But he did not go so far as he meant to go, at that. In the first place, Gray was an excellent noncom, and in the second place there was something in the boy’s upstanding figure and clear if worried eyes that, coupled with another of the excellent cigars, inclined him to leniency.

“But remember this, Gray,” he finished severely, “I don’t usually meddle with these things. But I’ve got my eye on you. One more infraction of discipline, and you’ll lose your stripes.”

“Yes, sir,” said Sergeant Gray.

He was intolerably virtuous all that day.

Late that afternoon they detrained two miles from the new camp, and marched along, singing lustily songs that sound better than they look in print, and joyously stretching legs too long confined. It mattered nothing to them that the temporary camp was untidy and badly drained; that the general passing in a limousine was reading an order that meant an emergency abroad, into which they were to be thrown at once; that a certain percentage of them would never come back; and that a certain other percentage would return, never again to tramp the open road or to see the blue sky overhead.

But a girl in a little car trailing in the dust behind the staff cars thought of those things, and almost ran over the company goat, Eloise, because of tears.

“Darned little idiot!” murmured Sergeant Gray, and gave his last doughnut to Eloise.

There was no thrill, no increase over the regular seventy-six beats a minute of his heart to tell him that love had just passed by in a pink hat.

Until eighty-thirty that night Sergeant Gray was obnoxiously virtuous. He had met an English noncom in the camp, and was studiously endeavouring to copy that gentleman’s carriage and dignity. And the attraction of the new surroundings had turned the attention of the troop from him and his wager to other things. A discovery, too, of certain conditions in the barracks distracted them.

“A week here,” growled the second mess sergeant, “and we’ll all have to be dipped.”

“Might as well get used to it, old son,” said Sergeant Gray, and hummed a little ditty to the effect that “They are wild, simply wild, over me.”

But with the falling of darkness the high spirits of the crowd broke loose. That night there was a battle royal in the barracks. The lower squad room, which housed among others the N. C. O.’s, decided to raid the two upper squad rooms. Word of this having been passed up, the upper squad rooms were prepared. At the top of the stairs were stationed the fire buckets, filled to the top, and a pile of coal stolen from the kitchen and secretly conveyed to the upper floor by means of baskets, a window and a rope.

Twice the lower squad reached the top of the staircase, amid wild yells and much splashing of water. The hall and stairs were running small rivers. Coals, recklessly flung down, were salvaged like hand grenades by the attacking force and thrown back again.

The noise penetrated to august quarters, and the sentry at the door, placed there for just such an emergency, having been infected with the mad desire to fight, and being at that moment in the act of climbing the coal rope to attack the enemy from the rear, an officer with a flash was at the door before he was seen.

Followed instantaneous quiet with the only sound the dripping of water down the stairs. Followed the silent retreat of the warriors to beds, into which they crept fully dressed. The officer moved through the lower squad room. It was extremely quiet save for an occasional deep-throated snore. The officer smiled grimly and went away.

And in the darkness Sergeant Gray sat up and felt of his right eye.

In the early dawn, hearing the cook stirring, he went across to the mess hall, a strange figure in his undergarments, with one eye closed and a bruise on his forehead as big as an egg. The cook eyed him angrily, and addressed him without regard to his dignity as a sergeant.

“Some o’ you fellows get busy and bring back that coal you took last night,” he said. “I got something else to do.”

“Look here, Watt,” said Sergeant Gray appealingly, “I’ll get the coal for you all right. But give me a piece of raw beefsteak, won’t you? Look at this eye.”

“Pleased to see it,” said the cook with a vindictive glare.

“Forget it, Watt. I’ll get your coal. See here, I’ve got leave to-morrow, and I want to go to the city.”

“Well, you can go, for all of me.”

“I want,” said Sergeant Gray plaintively, “to get my picture taken. I want to send it to my mother.”

Suddenly the cook laughed. He leaned over the big serving counter and laughed until he was weak.

“Picture!” he said. “My word! She’ll think the Germans have had you! Say, give me one, will you?”

He went to the refrigerator, however, and brought out a piece of raw beef.

It should have warned Sergeant Gray, lying sulkily on his cot through that bright spring day, the beef over his eye and attracting a multitude of flies, that no one else had suffered visible injury. The boys came and went blithely, each intent on his own affairs. United action had cleaned up the hallway and the stairs. But Sergeant Gray, picked out as Fate’s victim, lay and dozed and struck at flies and—waited.

By night the swelling had gone, but a deep bluish shadow encircled the right eye. Frequent consultation of his shaving mirror told him that he would have the mark for days, but at least he could see. That was something. He got up after dusk and dressed in the new uniform. Then he wandered about the camp.

He felt very lonely. Most of his intimates were on leave. Round the camp the men lounged negligently. Some one with a mandolin was strumming it, and from the theatre, where a movie show was going on, came the rattle of clapping hands. Sergeant Gray hesitated at the door, then he moved on.

What he wanted was some one to talk to, a girl preferably. He wandered past division headquarters, where the chief of staff stood inside a window rolling a cigarette; past the bull pen, surrounded by its fifteen feet of barbed wire and its military police.

At the edge of the camp he halted. From there one could see a brilliance reflected in the sky—the lights of the port of embarkation, ten miles away.

Sergeant Gray sighed and sat down on the road near an automobile. And somebody spoke to him.

“Can I take you anywhere?” asked the voice.

It was young and feminine. Something that had been aching in Sergeant Gray’s deep chest suddenly stopped aching and leaped.

“Thanks,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere in particular.”

“I just thought”—explained the voice—“I’m waiting for the—for a relative and I might as well be taking people to the street-car line. The taxis have stopped.”

A car leaving the camp threw its lights on her. She was small and young and had a pointed chin. Sergeant Gray got up.

“It’s awfully good of you,” he said. “If it isn’t too much trouble I’ll go to the end of the line.”

“Get in,” she said briefly.

Sergeant Gray sat back in the little car and drew a long breath.

“It’s rather small for you, isn’t it?” asked the girl, throwing in the clutch. “My brother has to fold up too. He’s in France,” she added. “That’s why I like to do things for the soldiers here. It’s like doing something for him.”

Sergeant Gray pondered this. He considered it rather an unusual thing for a girl to have thought of. He considered that she was as nice as she was pretty. He also considered that she drove well. Sergeant Gray, who in his leisure hours practiced running a motorcycle with the side car in the air, paid her tribute of approval.

“We’ll be over soon,” he said with a touch of pride.

“You’d better not tell anybody that.”

“Why? I rather think our being here tells the story.”

“Well, a lot of people would like to know just when you’re going. They hang round the men and offer them rides in cars, and the men get to talking, and pretty soon they’ve told all they know.”

“They’d better not try it on me.”

“You almost told me a moment ago.”

Sergeant Gray sat quiet and a trifle hurt.

“I am only warning you,” said the girl. “There are spies simply everywhere. I can’t do much, and that’s my way of doing something. That and being a sort of taxi,” she added.

They were in a town now, and by the lamps he saw just how pretty she was.

“Thanks awfully for warning me,” he said rather humbly. “A fellow gets to think that all this spy talk is—just talk.”

“Well, it isn’t,” said the girl briefly but with the air of one who knew.

The sergeant eyed her askance.

“That sounds as though you knew something.”

“Perhaps I do. Though of course one doesn’t really know these things. One suspects.”

“Naturally one does.”

She glanced at him, but his face was grave.

“What I would like to know,” he proceeded, “is what one does when one suspects.”

“I am afraid you are trying to be funny,” she observed coldly, and brought the car to a standstill. “Here’s your car line.”

He hesitated. Then he made a wild resolve.

“I see it,” he said agreeably. “Thanks awfully for bringing me. We can go back now.”

She stared at him.

“You are not going anywhere?”

“Why, no,” he said, trying not to look conscious. “I said that I’d like to go to the end of the car line.”

“You’re there.”

“I only wanted to look at it.”

“Very well. Get out and look at it. I don’t think you’ll find it unusual in any way.”

“Look here,” he said humbly. “I’m awfully sorry. I was just hungry to talk to some one, and when you offered——”

“I have done exactly as I offered. You will please get out!”

He got out slowly. He was overcome with wretchedness and guilt, but her pointed chin was held high and her face was obstinate.

“Thank you very much,” said Sergeant Gray, and turning drearily commenced his lonely walk back to camp.

He could hear her behind him backing and turning in the narrow street. He plodded on, cursing himself. If he had had any sense and had got out and let her think he was going somewhere——

The lights of the car were close behind him now. When they were abreast he heard the grinding of the brakes as it stopped.

“I don’t want to be disagreeable,” said the girl, beside him. “I suppose you did want some one to talk to. I’ll take you back if you like.”

“I’d better not bother you any more.”

Suddenly she laughed. In the light from a street lamp she had caught her first real glimpse of his face.

“Wherever did you get that eye?” she demanded.

“Fighting,” he said shortly. “We had a roughhouse at the barracks last night.”

“I should think you were going to have enough trouble soon without getting beaten up like that,” she said with a touch of severity. “Well, are you going to get in?”

He got in. She had been rather reserved coming down, but now she was more talkative. His little remark about being hungry for some one to talk to had struck home. Her brother had said something like that once. They must get hungry for girls, nice girls.

So now she chattered and she drew from the tall boy beside her something about himself. It was not particularly hard to do. Sergeant Gray opened up like a flower in the sun. He explained, for instance, that he was to have a commission when he was twenty-one.

“Unless,” he admitted, “I’m in too bad with the Old Man.”

“The Old Man?”

“The general,” explained Sergeant Gray, unaware that the young lady was sitting very straight. “He’s hell—he’s strong for discipline, and all that. And—well, every now and then I slip up on something, and he gets me. It’s always me he gets,” he finished plaintively and ungrammatically.

“But you shouldn’t do things that are wrong.”

Sergeant Gray pondered this amazing statement.

“Perhaps you’re right,” he acknowledged. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“You might try being terribly well behaved for—well, for twenty-four hours.”

“Do you want me to?”

“It’s entirely a matter of your own good,” she said rather coldly.

“I’ll do it!” said Sergeant Gray rashly. “Not a misstep for twenty-four hours. How’s that?”

“It sounds well.”

“The truth is,” confided Sergeant Gray, “I’ve got to be good. He’s watching. He told me so.”

“And if you’re not——”

“Shot against a brick wall probably.” He grinned cheerfully. “Think of that hanging over a fellow, and twenty-three and a half hours’ leave to-morrow.”

“I hope,” she said in the motherly tone she assumed now and then, “that you are going to be awfully careful to-morrow.”

“Did you ever see a cat crossing a wet gutter? Well, that’s me to-morrow. This is no time to take any chances.”

At which probably those particular gods that had Sergeant Gray in their keeping laughed behind their hands.

The girl stopped the car at the camp, and the plaything of destiny descended.

“Thank you, awfully,” observed the said plaything with a considerable amount of warmth in his voice. “I—perhaps I shall not see you again.”

“I was just thinking—what time does your leave commence to-morrow?”

“At ten-thirty”—hopefully.

“I might pick you up then and take you to the trolley.”

“Honestly, would you?” he asked delightedly. “You know, I—really, I can’t tell you how grateful I would be.”

“I love to make the taxi men wriggle,” was her rather unsatisfactory reply. “I’ll be here, then. Good night.”

Sergeant Gray saluted and went away. To all appearances he was a rather overgrown young man trudging through the mud of a not too-tidy camp to a barracks that needed carbolising. Actually he was a sublimated being favoured of heaven and floating in a rosy cloud of dreams.

“Halt!” said a guard, and threw his rifle to port arms. “Who’s there?”

“Sergeant of the Headquarters Troop,” said the superman.

“Where’s your pass?”

The superman presented it, and the guard inspected it closely—the attitude of the M. P. being that all men are Germans unless proved otherwise.

“Thoroughly satisfactory?” inquired the superman.

The M. P. grunted.

The sergeant approached him and lowered his voice confidentially.

“Tell you something,” he volunteered: “I’m not the same chap who went out on that pass.”

“What d’you mean you’re not?”

“It’s like this, old son. But first of all let me ask you something.” He glanced about cautiously. “Man to man, old son—do you believe in love at first sight?”

“Last fellow who tried being funny round here,” said the guard grimly, “had a chance to laugh himself to death in the bull pen.”

“No heart!” sighed the sergeant, moving on, still on air. “No soul! No imagination! Good night, my sad and lonely friend. Good night!”

He moved on, singing in a very deep bass:

“_Oh, promise me that some day you and I May take our love te tum, te tum, te tum._”

The chief of staff, who had also discovered that his quarters needed fumigation, raised from an uneasy pillow and groaned disgustedly.

“Stop that noise out there!” he bawled through the window beside him.

The superman recognised neither the voice nor the new quarters of the staff.

“Minion,” he said, halting and addressing the window, “hast never loved?”

Then he moved on, still in a roseate cloud the exact shade of a certain pink hat.

“_That we may take our love and faith renew, And find the hollows where those violets grew-w-w——_”

His voice died away, swallowed up in distance and the night.

When he went into the lower squad room a sort of chant greeted him from the beds: “Where, oh where’s the sergeant been?”

And the reply shouted lustily: “Out getting measured for a shave.”

He undressed quietly, and salvaging the piece of beefsteak from under his pillow got into bed and placed it carefully over his eye.

III

But tragedy had marked Sergeant Gray for its own. At reveille he rolled over, yawned and without lifting himself reached up to the pocket of his blouse and retrieved his whistle.

He blew it and shouted as usual: “R-r-roll out, you dirty horsemen! R-r-roll out!”

Then, arms under his head, he lay and dreamed. Round the day to come he wove little fantasies of the new uniform, and money in his pocket, and twenty-three and a half hours’ leave, and—the girl in the little car. His pass he had already secured through the top sergeant. It had been, with others on the pass list, O.K’d by the captain and re-O.K’d by the military police. At ten-thirty that morning Sergeant Gray would be a free man.

He made a huge breakfast, and careful inspection showed the eye greatly improved. And he whistled blithely while laying out his things for the official inspection, comparing his belongings carefully with a list in his hand. Nothing was to go wrong that day, nothing mar the perfection of it or curtail his leave.

But he failed to count the camp quartermaster; and that Destiny, which had taken him in hand forty-eight hours ago, was making of him her toy.

Now camp quartermasters are but human. They have their good days and their bad, and sometimes it rather gets on their nerves, the eternal examining and determining, for instance, that every man of perhaps thirty thousand possesses in perfect condition:

2 breeches, O. D. wool, prs.

2 coats, O. D. wool.

1 overcoat, O. D. wool.

1 slicker.

1 hat.

1 cord (cavalry, infantry, artillery).

3 undershirts, cotton.

3 underbreeches, cotton, prs.

5 socks, light wool, prs.

5 shirts, flannel, O. D.

2 shoes, field, prs.

Sergeant Gray’s Destiny, working by devious ways, had given the camp inspector a headache, a bad breakfast, a shirt lost by the laundry and a wigging by somebody or other. Into the bargain it was a fine day for golf and here he was looking over breeches, O. D. wool, pairs, two; and so on.

Into the barracks then came fate in the shape of the camp inspector, military of figure and militant of disposition, to count the pins for shelter halves, for instance, and generally to do anything but swing a golf club, as his heart desired. The men lined up by their equipment and the inspector went down the line. And he opened, by evil chance, Sergeant Gray’s condiment can and found the space-to-let notice inside.

He looked at it, and then he looked at the tall sergeant. Now to save all he could of his twenty-three and a half hours’ leave Sergeant Gray had put on his new uniform, which was against the rules. He had obeyed the regulations exactly as to his hat cord, whistle, collar insignia, buttons and shoes. Otherwise from his healthy skin to his putties he wore not a single issue article.

The second mess sergeant eying him before inspection had warned him.

“You’ll get into trouble with that outfit, Gray,” he had said. And Gray had replied that if he did it would be his trouble.

“Possibly,” had been the second mess sergeant’s comment. “But if you put him in a bad humour and get him started—there’ll be hell to pay.”

And now there was to be hell to pay. And the inspector, who might have been expected to walk in one door and out another but did not, stood off and surveyed him coldly.

“Issue uniform?” he demanded.

“N-no, sir.”

“Take it off!”

Sergeant Gray obeyed. Once off, the full extent of his iniquity, as to his undershirt, underbreeches and socks, was revealed.

“Scrap the clothing this man is wearing,” ordered the inspector. And to Sergeant Gray: “Show me your issue uniforms.”

Now the sergeant was hard on clothing, and particularly on breeches. Also he had given one uniform to Watt, the cook. The single one he was able to produce was badly worn; so badly, indeed, that the camp inspector with his two hands tore the breeches apart, at a vital spot, and flung them on the floor. Something in Sergeant Gray’s breast seemed to tear also and sink to the floor.

“Scrap this one also,” ordered the camp inspector.

“Sir——” ventured Sergeant Gray desperately.

But the camp inspector had discovered something, namely: That the issue uniforms of the Headquarters Troop of the ——th Division were of poor material. Slowly and carefully he went through the lot. Sharply and decisively, at the end, he gave his orders.

“Scrap every uniform in the troop,” he said, “and send this order to the camp quartermaster.”

In ten minutes one hundred and ninety-five men stood to attention in their undergarments, and in the center of each squad room lay a great heap of discarded khaki.

“Leaving us rather stripped, sir,” ventured the captain.

“They’ve got their slickers,” curtly observed fate; “and the quartermaster will fix you up all right.”

He went out. Jove, what a day for golf!

“Sergeant!” called the captain.

He avoided the baleful eyes of his men and looked out of a window. He was rather young and terribly afraid he would laugh.

The supply sergeant, thus called, came forward and saluted. He was a queer figure in his woolens, and the captain coughed to recover his voice.

“Put—put on your slicker,” he said, “and carry this order to the camp quartermaster. And hurry!”

Now all the balance of this story rests on that order to hurry, for it came about that the supply sergeant, running, put his toe under the edge of a board and fell heavily, and a military policeman, discovering thus that the sergeant wore no breeches, placed him immediately under arrest.

“Oh, very well,” said the supply sergeant politely; and put the order in his slicker pocket. If they chose to arrest a man for a thing he couldn’t help let them do it. He didn’t absolutely know what was in the order and if he could sit in the bull pen the troop could sit in its underwear. It was nothing whatever to him.

He grinned malevolently, however, when he saw the captain and the two lieutenants of the troop leaving camp in a machine in the direction of the city.

“All right,” he said to himself. “We’ll see something later, that’s all. The old boy will be crazy about this.”

The old boy being the general.

In the barracks black despair was in Sergeant Gray’s heart. He made a wild effort to retrieve his new uniform from the heap which was to be carried out and burned, but the troop were a unit against him.

“Aw, keep still!” they said in effect. “You got us into this, and you’ll stick it out with us.”