"Me? Go with you? Do you think I'd be a newspaper correspondent?"
"No, of course not. It never entered my head. But why don't you get a commission in the volunteers from your uncle? He can get just what he wants, and they're talking of him for Secretary of War. All you've got to do is to resign here and apply for a commission as colonel. Then you'll probably land as a major, or a captain at any rate. By the time the war is over, you'll be a general, if I know you, and then you can be appointed captain in the regular army on retiring from the volunteers, when our class is just graduating. You're just made for a successful soldier. You've got the ambition and the courage, and you've got just the brains for a soldier. You don't want to remain a lieutenant until you are fifty, do you?"
There was great force in Cleary's argument, and Sam knew it. East Pointers were scandalized at the manner in which outsiders were jumped into important commands in the field, and when engagements took place the volunteers came in for all the praise, while the regulars who did almost all the work were hardly mentioned.
"I'll think it over," said Sam. "I'll speak to Marian about it. It's very kind of you to think of me."
"Not a bit," said Cleary. "I'm looking out for myself. If you go as a major and I go as correspondent, I'll just freeze to you and make a hero of you whether you will or not. I'll make your fortune, and you'll make mine. I'll see that you get a chance, and I know that you'll take it if you get it. You're just cut out for it. Now get permission from the young woman and we'll call it a go."
The following afternoon Sam walked over the same ground, but this time it was Marian who accompanied him. She was enthusiastic over Cleary's proposition.
"Just think of it! You'll come back a hero and a general, and I don't know what not, and we'll get married, and the President will come to the wedding; and then we'll have our wedding tour up here, and the corps will turn out and fire a salute, and we'll be the biggest people at East Point. Won't it be splendid?"
"Perhaps, dear, I'll never come back at all. Who knows? I may get killed."
"Oh, Sam! if you did, how proud I'd be of it. I'd wear black for a whole year, and they'd put up a monument to you over there in the cemetery and have a grand funeral, and I'd be in the first carriage, and the flag would be draped, and the band would play the funeral march. Oh, dear! how grand it would be, and how all the girls would envy me!"
Tears came to her eyes as she spoke.