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."