The night before we went up for our final medical examination by the regular army surgeon, Captain Fletcher called me into his tent.
“Drake, how about your eyes?” says he.
I hadn’t thought of that, supposing that it could be fixed the same as it was at Range City. I told him so, and he said it couldn’t, not with the regular army surgeons. But says he:
“You’re a good soldier, and I got you to raise my reserves. They won’t let you in if you can’t pass the eye-test, glasses or no glasses. If it should happen that you learned a little formula that tallies with the eye-card, you wouldn’t let on that I gave it to you, I suppose?”
“I’m good at forgetting,” I says.
“Burn it when you’ve learned it,” he says, and he gave me a paper with long strings of letter on it. I learned it backward and forward, and so on that I could begin in the middle and go both ways. I lay awake half the night saying it over.
Naked as I was born, I floated in on the examiners for my physicals. Lungs, as they make them in the cow-country; weight, first-class; hearing, O. K. They whirled me and began to point. Taking a tight squint—you see better that way—I ripped through the formula: P V X C L M N H—I can see it yet. I could just see what line on the card he was pointing at, and never a darned bit more.
They make that sort of a doctor in hell. He saw me squint—and he began skipping from letter to letter all over the card. No use—I guessed and guessed dead wrong. “Rejected!” just businesslike, as if it was a little matter like a job on a hay-press. I went out and sat all naked on my soldier-clothes—my soldier-clothes that I was never going to wear any more—and covered up my head. It was the hardest jolt that I ever got—except one.
Captain Fletcher hadn’t any pull; he couldn’t do anything. Some of the twenty that I rounded into Range City talked about striking, they were so mad, but that wouldn’t do any good. I watched them sworn in next day, shuffling into the armory in new overall clothes. I stood around camp and saw them drill. I saw them go down the streets to the transport—flowers in their gun-barrels, wreaths on their hats, and the people just whooping. I sneaked after them onto the transport, and there I broke out and cussed the regular army and everything else. Old Fletcher saw it. He wasn’t sore; he understood. But I wish I had killed him before I let him do what he did next. He said:
“He can’t be with us, boys, and it ain’t his fault. But Striped Rock is going to have its hero. I am going to be correspondent for the Striped Rock Leader. If we have the luck to get into a fight, he’ll be the hero in my piece in the paper, and the man that gives away the snap ain’t square with Company N. Here’s three cheers for Admeh Drake, the hero of Company N!” he said. When they pulled out, people were cheering them and they cheering me. It heartened me up considerably, or else I couldn’t have stood to see them sliding past Telegraph Hill into the stream and me not there with them.