“But about the meeting in the dark, and the talk we heard?”
“Well, if I was sure what it meant I’d speak of it. But we may only get laughed at for imagining things if we speak of it. And we haven’t much to go on. Let the corporal do the talking.”
This they did, with the result that Pug Kennedy was punished for being out after taps and trying to run the guard, no very serious offense, but one which carried with it an extra round of police work—cleaning up around camp—and Pug was more or less the laughing butt of his comrades.
“It’s all your fault!” he declared to Ned and Jerry. “You wait! I’ll get square with you!”
But as several days passed, and the “scrapper,” as he was called, made no effort to carry out his threat, Ned and Jerry rather forgot about it. As for the midnight meeting, it seemed to have been nothing more than an attempt on the part of Pug Kennedy to be friendly with some civilian he had met in town.
“Though what they were talking about I can’t guess,” said Jerry.
“Same here,” agreed Ned.
The days in camp were spent in drill. It was drill, drill, drill from morning until night.
Most of the drills were for the purpose of getting the new soldiers in good physical shape, fit to stand the hard work that would come later. To the three motor boys it was much the same sort of thing they had gone through when training for football. There were the preliminary steps, the slow movements, followed by speeding-up practice and then hard driving.
In the course of a few weeks they learned how to march in unison, how to go through certain parts of the rifle drill without making it look too ragged, and finally, one day, orders were issued for bayonet drill.