The captain of K Company was very particular about the physique of his men, and the surgeon and he had a confidential arrangement which had kept out of the service many a man who might have passed a fair examination before the army board. When Captain Harkins saw Johnny in the ranks of the “rookies,” he gave a gasp of horror and ran post haste to the surgeon’s quarters. He entered the tent rather unceremoniously, somewhat ruffling the self-composure of its occupant, who was rather austere and dignified at times.
“Ah, Captain,” said the surgeon, “what’s the trouble, somebody hurt?”
“Hurt!” exclaimed the captain, “Hurt! Great Scott! I’m paralyzed. How in Heaven’s name did you ever pass that little degenerate shrimp of a gutter snipe that came in with that last batch of rookies? Is this a practical joke?”
“I never make practical jokes,” replied the surgeon, serenely. “I had a little whim of my own to gratify. Didn’t know I was whimsical, did you? Well, I am, and that boy is my latest whim. I fancied the service would be better for him than the jail. I had him assigned to your company—well, because you and I understand each other pretty well, and because I want him myself. Just reassign him to me for special duty, and I’ll do the rest.”
The captain roared. “Well,” he said, when he had caught his breath, “you have perpetrated a practical joke all the same, and landed good and proper. You had me well nigh scared into a fit.”
Johnny, inscribed in regulation form as John Blank, on the muster roll of K. Company, was formally assigned to duty in the hospital department, and the following morning found him standing at the door of the surgeon’s tent, a full-fledged orderly, with a rudely extemporized cross of red flannel upon the arm of his “big brother” blouse. There was a little quiet snickering at the surgeon’s expense, but this soon died out, for the man of saws and pills was sensitive, somewhat muscular and, above all, wore the maple leaf on his shoulder straps.
The colonel was very indulgent with the surgeon; he knew his failings, and when his eyes fell upon the new orderly, he smilingly remarked to the adjutant, “I hope the major will be able to raise that slummy looking chap to be a soldier, but I’m afraid he has a big contract on his hands.”
But the surgeon was a practical humanitarian who believed in a physical basis of things moral. He had a hobby, as the new recruit soon discovered. Johnny was daily put through a course of physical “stunts” that made his life something more than a glad, sweet song. He was a little rebellious at first, and his instructor had hard work to keep him from deserting. Through the connivance of the colonel, however, who had the boy brought before him after some very flagrant act of insubordination and depicted to him in vivid colors a vision of an early morning firing squad, Johnny was brought back into line again and went on with his stunts. He was just a little suspicious of the “Old Man’s” seriousness, but after the major had informed him that the colonel was a man of great earnestness of purpose and absolutely devoid of regard for human life—blood-thirsty, in fact—he became in a measure reconciled to what at first seemed to him a hard lot.
But as Johnny’s training proceeded, he was conscious of a new and unwonted interest in life. He began to have a sense of physical strength, and felt an increase of energy that made his course of physical training pleasurable. His shoulders were beginning to set up and back. It was no longer necessary to either drive or coax him to his task of self-development. The surgeon was meanwhile devoting such time as he could steal from his daily routine of antidoting the endeavors of the government to prepare our soldiers for Cuba by killing them in Tampa, to stimulation of the mental side of the neglected boy of the streets. Johnny had innate capacity enough but, as the major said, he had never in his whole life had any healthy blood to feed his brain, hence the development of the latter was not possible until now.
The men of the regiment scarcely appreciated the gradual change in Johnny. He unfolded just as a plant unfolds. Growth was there, steadily going on. The major knew, and the colonel remarked upon it, but the rest did not comprehend until one day the street boy stripped to the buff and, urged on by the mock encouragement of some of the privates, entered an improvised ring for a “friendly” contest with an ex-professlonal, who had entered the service chiefly in search of novelty in the way of recreation. When the affair was over with, and the amateur referee had finished the rather prolonged count over Johnny’s opponent, Tom O’Brien said delightedly; “Begorra, the byes didn’t get a run fer their money. Yez kin all poke fun at Johnny now, an’ ask him all the sassy quistions ye loike, an’ divil a wurrud’ll I say to yez, unless yez go in more than wan at a toime.”