Part 4

"You say you know, because you've been a candidate yourself; but who tells all these girls?"

"Oh, the girls!" said the cadet. "Yes, there's a good many girls here; and what some of 'em don't know, and don't do, wouldn't fill a collar-box. Even Crinkem's head could hold it."

"Who is Crinkem?"

"My respected classmate. Absolutely worried along so far, and gone on furlough. Nobody can guess how he did it, either. Who are you?"

"Charlemagne Kindred."

The cadet gave a long, "Whew!"

"Is that all you have for week days?" he asked.

"Not quite," said Magnus, smiling in spite of himself. "They call me Magnus, at home."

"Won't do you any good here," said the other, shaking his head. "Name's got to go down in full, if it was Beelzebub Nebuchadnezzar. You'll be rechristened for common use."

"Do they always do that?" said Magnus, looking grave.

"Mostly."

Magnus reddened.

"I cannot see what the Faculty have to do with my name," he said. "It's not their business."

"Not the Faculty, as you call them, at all," said the cadet, "but your beloved fellow-students. They will take almost as anxious care of you as will the Com."

"Oh, the other cadets!" said Magnus loftily. "I'll take care of them."

"I would," said the man in grey with dry emphasis. "Not too many at once. There's quite a few of them."

Magnus sat studying the north view without seeing it.

"But how is this?" he said suddenly. "You say your classmate has gone on furlough--why aren't you gone too?"

The cadet shrugged his shoulders.

"Some men leave their country for their country's good," he said, "and some stay in it, same at same. I lost my furlough. But anyhow Crinkem went ahead of time; folks sick at home. He's always in luck."

"_Lost_ it," Magnus repeated. "How could you?"

"Easy enough, if you run against the Tacs in a tight place. Lose anything here, except your heart and your appetite."

But to these last words Magnus gave no heed; his whole soul was astir with this new idea. _Lose his furlough!_ Not go home even at the end of the two long years!

"Can you do that?" he said. "Is it often done?"

"Not so very. Oh, you can do it, fast enough, if you have a run of bad luck, as I did."

"I don't believe in luck," Magnus answered him.

"Don't you? Well, you will, when you've been here a month."

And now a party of strollers came by the seat; another much-dressed young damsel, set in a framework of grey uniforms. As they passed, the lady bowed; Magnus's friend stood up and doffed his cap, the other cadets also touching theirs; and again (against his will) Magnus admired and envied the easy precision of every movement. He wondered if he could take off his hat with that peculiar swing?--and said no, to himself, at once. But he would have it before furlough--and how astonished Cherry would be!

"Been round Flirtation?" demanded his new acquaintance abruptly, watching the three who went slowly on towards where the path left the brow of the hill, and ran down among the cedars.

"Round flirtation!"

The cadet laughed.

"You needn't look so scared," he said--"it's only one of our walks. At least it isn't generally anything else. Come on, and I'll show it to you. I don't see what Fitch is after with that girl; cutting out poor little Day. And he can talk a dozen to Day's one. Come along."

So they rose up, and stepped on at a good pace, till they had the others in full sight again; dropping then into the like easy saunter. At least it was easy to one, but for Magnus like being in bonds; and he was constantly getting ahead, checking himself, and falling back.

"I'll teach them how to walk, when I'm once in," he thought. Then aloud:

"We should call this slow doings out West," he said.

"Yes," said his companion. "Generally want to get there, out West, I suppose?"

"We certainly do."

"All right. Well, those folks don't."

It was such a self-evident fact about the three in front, that Magnus looked from them to the man at his side, and his eyes flashed with fun. They both laughed.

"Do none of them ever want to get _anywhere_?" said Magnus.

"Not often--on Flirtation. Spoil the fun, you know."

"Well, you say that is Mr. Fitch, and the other is Mr. Day, then who are you?" said Magnus.

"To be sure!" said the cadet with a lazy drawl. "I've been wondering how long a Westerner could get along without asking."

If Magnus grew hot at this implied charge, he had no chance to show it then. A sudden drum-call, clear and loud, sent its racket through the still air. The cadet stopped short.

"There!" he said; "that beastly review is to come off, after all."

And without another word, he turned and darted up the hill. In another minute, Fitch and Day went speeding by, at the same keen, measured pace, which struck Magnus as unlike anything he had ever seen. A few bounds brought him up to the green level of the plain, where he could watch the three, as they hurried along to the grey barracks. Nor those three alone. From every side, from all directions, the grey and white came hurrying in. Hurrying--yet always with the same even, regular, swift step; the foot lifted just so high, the right arm swinging just so far; and with no seeming effort. Magnus saw one and another of them take off his cap to some lady as he flew by, but without the least pause or break. Only two or three very much belated men dropped into a walk as they neared the barracks. As Rosamund said, "It was too late to get up early."

VI

A LONELY CANDIDATE

Nothing useless is, or low; Each thing in its place is best: And what seems but idle show, Strengthens and supports the rest.

--LONGFELLOW.

Magnus strolled leisurely along, thinking first that he could show these cadets how to run, and then beginning to have grave doubts on the subject; and finally finding himself a seat under the trees, where he could look and listen in shady comfort. Eyes and ears had full occupation.

There was a busy note of preparation everywhere, and especially among the drums. Beating there, and then beating here; the sound caught up and echoed back from the grey rocks on the green hillside. Then came out uniforms of various sorts (Magnus personified the dress, not knowing the men) and proceeded to mark off a certain space on the green in front of him, setting a gay little banner at the four corners of a large, large square.

Then, at first slowly, but soon hurrying up from every point of the compass, a many-coloured crowd swarmed in and filled the seats--filled them presently so full that Magnus gave up his place to the next gauzy creature that came along. She fluttered down into the seat with much gratulation and no thanks, and Magnus gravely took his stand in the rear.

He had no lack of company, even there. Officers in various uniforms, civilians in all sorts of coats, and girls in all sorts of finery, stood beside and around him.

And now, also, there came straying in another small posse, whom Magnus instinctively knew as of his own kind. Yes, they must be candidates; partly, perhaps, because they could not possibly be anything else; no other class owned them. Yet how did _he_ know that?--to whom all classes here were strange. What possible connection between that dapper little fellow in straw hat and black alpaca coat, and this young giant who wore a cloth cap and a fluttering linen duster? Or how was his next neighbour in a Derby and long frock coat like the fourth man, who wore brown trousers, a cutaway coat, and a wide-awake? Yet even Magnus could see that "candidate" was written on them all. So plainly, indeed, that he stepped further back and put himself behind the tree. Anybody who looked at him standing there--and some did look--saw a tall, well-made young fellow in a neat and perfectly unobtrusive suit of brown-grey cloth. Very dark hair and with a wilful curl that tossed it about every way. Excellent features, ignorant as yet of life's moulding touch; and a sweet, mobile mouth, set just now in very grave lines indeed, and so hiding one of the great charms of his face. For nobody could watch Magnus Kindred when he smiled or laughed, and not notice the _clean_ look: the utterly pure and true lines into which those grave ones changed. For the rest, hands and feet were well shaped and in excellent order; and the whole bearing was both self-reliant and unconscious.

But it seemed as if the gayer grew the scene, the soberer grew that young face gazing out from behind the tree. For of all the lonely places, commend me to an unknown throng of pleasure-seekers, where everyone belongs to someone, is waiting for someone, or is waited for, and you belong to none. No eyes are watching for you, no heart stirs when you come in sight; and no one will miss you if you do not come at all.

So Magnus felt that day. The more people came, the more he was crowded almost from standing-room, the wider grew the heart distance between himself and the bright world about him. Gay girls, pretty girls, thronged the seats and the walk; Magnus only felt that none of them was Cherry, and every older woman that came by, decked in feathers and flowers and laces, sent his thoughts off with such a rush to his own dear mother, in her simplest go-to-meeting bonnet, that it was all the boy could do to stand there and give no sign. And at even the officers he looked askance, wondering which of them might possibly be "Tacs."

"Poor fellow!" said some of the kind hearts amid the finery. "He looks pretty homesick."

"Such a handsome boy, too. You must take him out in the German, Floy."

"Oh, _he_ can't go to the German," said Miss Floy, who had reached the mature age of thirteen. "None of the plebs can. And he's only a candidate, yet. Besides, I don't care much for any man that doesn't wear chevrons."

And the mother laughed and repeated the smart saying to her next neighbour.

If there arose in the mind of Charlemagne Kindred an instant resolve to wear chevrons, at whatever cost, you must not think hardly of him. These pretty, airy creatures wield a powerful sceptre and their silken cords are strong.

How the people crowded in! They sat where they could, and stood where they shouldn't. They grouped themselves round the old trees, and made a strong background to the iron seats. Officers, civilians, matrons, girls--and candidates. Little children dropped down on the green edge of the parade ground, and at last grown-up and hard-pushed people sat there, too. Then an imposing police sergeant came along, waving them off with his black wand. And the people jumped up, growling and frowning, and, as soon as they saw his back, dropped down again.

As for Magnus, the whole thing seemed to wind him up in tightening cords of tension. He was outside now, but to-morrow at this time he would be in; caught and bound and caged behind a cordon of regulations. Assigned a place, turned over to duties which he could in no wise quit or change. Not to see home again for two long years.

Should he do it? Or should he, in these last hours of freedom, set himself free for good? Take the first train for the West, and leave all his great prospects behind him, and the chevrons and shoulder-straps to someone else? Thoughts came and went, surged and rolled back; and the whistle of each train, as it flew by, just made the confusion deeper. "Come!" they seemed to say. "Come-m-me-me!"

Meantime the review went on; the citizen actors showed how they could not march and the cadets how they could; and this last part was so fine that Magnus fairly forgot himself and his trouble. Round the great square they went; the grey and white lines moving like some one elastic thing. Corners made no break, hot sunbeams seemed unnoticed. So they marched round; first slow, then fast; and then began the double-timing.

How beautiful it was! Privates in their glancing lines; cadet officers leading on, and running backwards or forwards with equally unerring footsteps. Heading all, the Commandant. Years had passed away since he learned the double-quick; and the supple boy had changed into the grey-haired man; but his foot never faltered, his step never lagged. The white-plumed blue uniform led on the grey with a gallantry it was pretty to see. Magnus watched the whole with deepest admiration; down to the last bit of timeful running with no music to mark it off.

He was noticing every step; eyeing the black shoe-soles that came up as one, the bent-knee line of white trousers, the glitter of the guns; forgetting everything else, when again the hated word came full upon his ear.

"Just look at that candidate, will you! It's as good as a play. I wonder he didn't join in."

"Ya-as," was answered in a drawling tone by her escort. "There he stands. Study his perfections now, while you can, Miss Jenny. Next week he will have ceased to shine upon the polite world. Exit the candidate, enter the beast. That is, if he gets in, which is doubtful."

A small thing may do the work where a large one fails; trains got no hearing, after that. That he would enter became instantly a fixed fact to that particular candidate.

The girl was certainly pretty. How would Cherry look, sitting there, and with himself in a grey coat bending over her, and twirling her parasol? Cherry was handsomer--miles away--than this girl. Deeper eyes, tenderer mouth, more glowing cheeks, too, for that matter. Yet she would not look _so_, the boy honestly owned to himself, though fuming a little over the admission; the whole make-up would be different. The very idea of such shoes as this damsel thrust out into the sunlight had never entered Cherry's wholesome head. "Shoe pegs," Magnus called the heels, with great scorn, and set right in the middle of her foot. And scarlet stockings. And her dress--what was it made of? No, Cherry would not look so; and however he might frown, Magnus felt the glamour, as most men do, of city dressmaking and "the correct thing."

"Country-made gowns look so different," said someone behind him.

Then that girl further on, in fluffs of white lace and muslin, white shoes, white gloves, and her dainty head crowned with "an acre" of Leghorn, and "a half bushel" of roses. No, neither would Cherry look like her. And now the boy's fancy brought the little country maiden, in her country garb--even her Sunday best--and set her down beside these two. A plain white gown, with no setting off but the simple ruffles which Cherry had embroidered, and the exquisite laundry work which she had also done herself. Black shoes, which were made for walking ("but either one of those white ones could hold 'em both," thought Magnus, in his hot fancy). Then a broad straw hat, round which Violet's deft fingers had twined a dark green riband; while the hands, which were small, indeed, and comely, but unwhitened with either idleness or lemon, wore only a pair of spotless Lisle thread gloves.

Magnus looked at the pink, the white, the tan kids all about him, and drew a deep breath.

"But she _shall_ sit there!" he said, with one of his fierce mental bursts. "She shall sit there, and look just so. No, not just so, for, if they try their prettiest, they can never any of them look like her."

VII

IN FOR IT

With this hand work, and with the other pray, And God will bless them both from day to day.

--_Old Vierlander Motto._

Some little time after the foregoing events, the following letter was sent from the West Point Post Office:

"CAMP HARD, June --, 18--.

"MY DEAR FOLKS AT HOME:

"Well, I am in for it. Uncle Sam has me, body and soul. At least the body is self-evident, and as I don't get time to say my soul's my own, I suppose he claims that, too,--Mr. Wayne to the contrary. Bought and paid for and sworn in; and earmarks enough for a drove of pigs. Do you want to know what I look like, you girls? Just at present I am a compound of grey and green in about equal mixture. No, I guess the green has it. Hair cut short, army shoes, and a brand new prison dress which might fit anybody else as well as it does me, and better. I get up by a gun, and go to bed by a drum, and have a bugle to tell me when to go to sleep, and as we are young and tender in the ways of the world, at every meal the first captain informs us when to stop eating. (He's nothing special to look at, Cherry. Don't open your eyes too wide. But he's such an old spoon that he's always in a hurry to get out and walk with some girl or other)."

"We study straight lines in the morning, and play leap-frog in the afternoon; and have girls come and make fun of us while we're at it. Yesterday they enjoyed it more than was good for themselves, and one of the officers ordered them off."

"There are two special prigs in chevrons, who have charge of our thumbs and shoulderblades; and when you girls come to see me, _one_ of 'em won't get an introduction, that's all. What do you think he did yesterday? It was hot enough to melt down your ideas, if you had any--hot as the middle line of the equator; and he had been drilling us as if he had never been drilled himself, and didn't know how it felt. So, when drill was over, he stood a lot of us round his tent door in the sun, and then made iced lemonade, and sat there drinking it with us looking on. Give us some? Not quite. Go to the store and buy our own lemons, Rose? Why, we can't get a shoestring without a special order. Corporal Mean smuggled in his sugar from the Mess Hall; and I guess Miss Flyaway brought him the lemons. If you want to know about Miss Flyaway, she's one of the girls; a summer girl, as they say here, and we plebs could spare her till winter just as well as not. She's as bad as a third-class corporal--only we can laugh at her and we can't at him. If we did, we'd be skinned in a minute. This is what I should hear read out after parade:

"'Kindred--disrespect to superior officer, at about 4.30 P. M.'--demerits according. Oh, well! we'll wear through somehow; it takes a good deal to kill a man. And they're not all like that. Cadet Captain Steady called me into his tent to-day and gave me a whole lot of good advice that would have gone to mother's heart. There's another Captain, too, Mr. Upright, who's as nice as he can be; and some of the Tacs aren't very bad to take. But we've got one in our company! I just wish you could see him. We call him Towser--because he's always nosing round, and sniffing about everywhere, to see what sort of a dry bone he can find to pick. He hasn't hived any of mine yet, but he spied a whole square inch of paper in front of Randolph's tent and reported him for disorder. You have to polish your shoestrings to go down A Company street, when he's in charge. So whoever sees him coming fires off a volley, and then we all know. Bow--wow--wow--wow--wow--wow!"

"You'll like my tentmate, Rig. That's not his name, of course, but we call him so because he's so B. J. about his dress. They don't leave him much hair to brush, but what he has takes up half his spare time."

"Now I know mother is aching to put in her questions--just waiting till I get through writing stuff. Well, ma'am, you see, we just _have_ to praise ourselves a little bit here, because if we don't do it, it don't get done; and so I call myself a pretty good boy. Whether I'd suit you exactly, I'll not say. I go to prayer-meeting twice a week and once to Chapel (_have_ to go there, so you needn't give me a credit), and I've not missed reading my chapter one day yet. Mr. Upright came by the other day when I was at it, and he stopped and walked in."

"'Keep straight on with your good home habits, Mr. Kindred,' he said, 'no matter what anybody says or does. Read the Bible just as much as you like; the more, the better. Remember:

"'He always wins, who sides with God.'"

"So I read every day. And I'm not likely to stop praying as long as I have you four to pray about. I guess I shall keep my colours flying--a storm flag, anyway. But it does blow pretty hard here sometimes, that is sure. Train says I can't do it. No use, he declares: says he's tried it and it won't work. (He was turned back, and so he has been here a year and thinks he knows.) He says there's no place in the course for religion; just as well give it up first as last."

"So I told him my mother had no 'give up' in her dictionary and never taught me how to spell the words."

"Poor Train! His mother went to heaven three years ago; though how she can enjoy herself up there, with him going on as he does down here, I can't see. Maybe she doesn't know."

"There goes the first drum! Good-bye. Kiss each other all round for me, beginning anywhere."

"MAGNUS KINDRED, U. S. Corps of Cadets."

"You mustn't think hard of Rig; he's a real good fellow. But you see he's a pinky-white creation: and it hurts his feelings to look like an acorn."

This letter was duly addressed, sealed, and stamped; went on the orderly's back to the post-office, and thence, in due course, across the continent to the far-off simple home at Barren Heights. There it alighted with the force and precision of a bombshell. That is, if force may be measured by commotion.

The strange phrases, the new ideas, the dim, vague vision of most unwonted doings--there is no telling what a stir-up it all was. The three girls had gone to the post office together in the course of their afternoon walk, and had taken turns at bringing the precious missive home. Now they sat about on the front steps, while Mrs. Kindred, in the porch rocking chair, opened and read the letter aloud.

I think she never even thought of a hidden meaning in "Camp Hard," passing it by as a mere name; but as she read on, even where the words themselves were perplexing, their intent was unmistakable. At the end of almost the very first sentence Mrs. Kindred took off her glasses, laid them down on the letter, and looked about her.

"No time to say his soul is his own," she said. "Why, what does this mean?"

Everybody else had felt the shock, but as usual they all crowded in to the rescue.

"It must be just his way of talking," said Violet. "Don't you know, mother, that when Magnus gets excited he always goes on stilts?"

"And of course, he is very busy," said Rose, "with so many new things to do."

"And you can see he is talking in the air, Mrs. Kindred," said Cherry's sweet voice, "because he instances something for which he does _not_ want time. Magnus has never called his soul his own, since he gave it to Christ to save and keep."

"Dear boy!" said the mother. "Thank you, Cherry, for reminding me. Yes, I will not doubt,"--and she read on.

"I cannot see why he says 'skinned,'" said Violet. "It's a very queer way to talk."

"But just like him," said Rose. "Magnus always did talk wild--just a little bit," the sisterly censure softening down. "And you see they play games for exercise--so that is very good."

"I suppose studying straight lines must mean drawing," said Cherry, looking down at the open letter. "Magnus will not care what they do, if they will only let him draw."

"I am not so anxious about all _that_," said the mother thoughtfully. "Boys at school must have some hardships and do many things they do not like. And you see he does go to prayer-meeting and read the Bible."

"But he says such strange things," said Violet, studying the letter from her side. "Do all people in the East have names like that? 'Rig,' and 'Mean,' and 'Upright'--it sounds like the Pilgrim's Progress."

"And so it is," said the mother, smiling faintly, through two big teardrops, "and Magnus is going over a part of the road where we have never been. That must be, girls. But the Lord is as strong there as here in Barren Heights; and Magnus is no weaker than he was at home--bless his dear heart! He never could bear that word 'weak.' I wish he had told us what he means by 'a storm flag.'"