An angry mix-up, school boy rules, followed, to the great detriment of the rations. Si and Shorty rushed up, separated the combatants, and administered shakes, cuffs, and sharp reprimands.
"Now, you quarrelsome little whelps," said Si, after quiet had been restored, "you've got to take them rations that you've spiled for yourselves. You shan't have no other. Put that bread and that meat you've kicked around into your own haversacks. Then go back there and roll up your blankets—same as the other boys. Alf Russell, you and Jim Humphreys come here and divide the rest o' these rations into seven parts, if you kin do it without fightin'."
The division of the rations proceeded, with some jars between Russell and Humphreys over the apportionment of fat and lean meat, and angry protests from little Pete Skidmore because they made his share smaller than anybody else's.
"Yit," said he, "I've got to march just as far as any of you, carry just as big a gun, and do just as much shootin'."
"You're wrong," said the medical-minded Alf Russell. "You ought to have less than the others, because you're smaller. The littler and younger the person the smaller the dose, always."
"No," acceded the farmer Jim Humphreys. "Tain't natural, nor right. You don't give a colt as much feed as you do a grown horse. Anybody knows that."
"Pete's plea is sound," contraverted the legal-minded Monty Scruggs. "All men are equal before the law, though they mayn't be a foot high. Rations are a matter of law, and the law's no respecter of persons."
"Rations is intended," persisted Alf, "to give a man what he needs to eat—nothing more, nothing less. Pete don't need as much as a man; why give it to him? There'd be just as much sense in giving him the clothes for a six-footer."
"All o' you are always imposin' on me 'cause I'm little," whimpered Pete. "And that stuck-up Alf Russell's the worst of all. Just because he's goin' to be a doctor, and leads in singin' at church, he thinks he knows more'n the man what writ the arithmetic, and he's down on me because I won't take all he says for law and gospel, in spite of his airs. Jim Humphreys is down on me, because I writ home that I'd shot a man back there at the burnt bridge, and Jim got skeered at a coon-huntin' nigger."
"Never mind, Pete," said Monty consolingly, "none o' them shall impose on you while I'm around. Now, Alf, you and Jim give Pete just as much as the rest, or I'll make you."