“Yes, I’m awake to the fact,” said I. “You needn’t construe.”
“It was all of eight years back,” Bones ran on, “for it was the year before Hazeltine went up to the command of the brigade. Colonel Elliott was major then, and Curtis, who’s senior major now, at that time was captain of ‘L’ and reigning Ali of The Forty Thieves. And I?—well, I hadn’t been commissioned, but was serving out the fag-end of my third enlistment as hospital steward. Gad! how the roster’s changed since.”
“Tempora mutantur—Latin!” I hastened to put in at this favorable point. “Proceed, you moss-grown veteran.”
“Well, this was the way of it,” said the learned doctor, acknowledging by a grin that honors were a stand-off on the score of dead languages. “When it came ’round to the time for our fall field-work that year, Hazeltine packed us aboard the cars for Glastonbury, down on the line of the B.S. & N.Y.
“For a wonder, the plan of operations was not at all complicated. The main object of the day’s work was to practise the men in skirmishing and in the gaining of ground by short platoon-rushes. So when we reached our destination, we marched out from the village a couple of miles, and then Elliott’s battalion was detached and posted along a stone wall and among some farm buildings, facing a broad sweep of open meadow, while the rest of the regiment footed it along for a mile farther, to return later in the character of bloody invaders.
“Now, up to this point everything was simple enough. But Elliott was—and, as you may have noticed, still is—a strategist of large calibre, and he’d taken the liberty of making a slight addition to the cut-and-dried plan of campaign. About a week before, he had run down to Glastonbury to look over the ground alone, and in the course of his travels he’d made some observations in regard to the lay of the land that set him to thinking. And this is what he thought:
“His four companies were to be attacked in front by the remaining eight, and in the nature of things he was fairly certain of being defeated, but he’d noted the fact that on the left of his position there was a thick growth of young timber, with an old wood-road running off into it, and on following this up he found that it made a circuit and came out into the meadow in his front, in such a way that a force marching over it would find itself eventually in rear of the right flank of the attacking party; and therefore he reasoned that he could make things very entertaining for the colonel’s contingent by availing himself of this feature of the landscape, and mentally made his dispositions accordingly.
“Now, I ought to have been with the main body; but when Elliott’s battalion detached itself I somehow got mixed up with it, and when I found out my mistake I decided to stay where I was—notwithstanding the fact that the assistant surgeon had been assigned to duty with the defence—rather than go chasing over a dusty road after the rest of the regiment. And that was where I played in luck, for if I’d been at my proper post I’d have missed my march with The Forty Thieves, and all the sport that came in at the end of it.
“Elliott had disposed his four companies in line of battle along the stone wall, but as soon as Colonel Hazeltine’s troops went out of sight around a bend in the road he gave some hurried instructions to Curtis, who straightway started ‘L’ company off into the woods. And then Elliott came riding down the line, and caught sight of me.
“‘Hello!’ says he, ‘you here? We seem to be pretty heavy laden with doctors. Just you hustle along after Curtis and his Thieves; an independent column ought to have a medicine-man of its own.’