I continued my bath. Rinsed thoroughly. Lathered all over again. Rinsed again. Turned off the water and made a hurry job of drying myself.
Believe me, I could pass a fireman’s dressing test after getting into my clothes as fast as I did this afternoon. I was proud of myself.
And I was clean! Thank God I was pure again, within and without—and another difficulty had been surmounted, with credit and satisfaction.
When I closed that bathroom door and noticed that sign again, I had to laugh. All one needed in this man’s army in order to get along was a little intelligence.
—2—
The day after my bath, we had trouble. I guess it was my own fault, for I should have told Ben about meeting Chilblaines in the bath, then he’d have been prepared for his visit the next morning.
The result of my negligence was that Esky was resting comfortably under the head of my bunk when the inspecting officers appeared, and when Ben saw Chilblaines it was too late to do anything about the pup. The snooty little lieut just had to poke his head in our place and look under the bunk. As Ben says, he would have looked under there if he didn’t look anywhere else all day. And when he saw what was there, he exploded like a bomb.
“Is this the way you men were taught to obey orders?” he demanded of Ben, who glowered at him, although he must have been scared stiff. “How did that dog get aboard after I explicitly told Canwick to get rid of it?”
Ben shrugged his shoulders but didn’t answer.
“Answer me! Are you dumb?”