I
IT was only because it was the middle of the night that the barracks of Company Number 1 lay quiet. Even at that solitary hour the squares of moonlight from its sliding windows revealed two long huddled rows of Gold Medal cots creaking with the turnings of one hundred and sixty restless sleepers.
Down toward the end of Squad 15, Joseph Morley Ruggs lay wrapped in dreams more troubled than was his wont. The 'Meter' was standing before him, writing with a feathered sword in a giant book, 'Thou art weighed in the balance and found—' The words kept spreading until the d was crushed against the edge of the page. The Meter’s eyes became flaming nozzles, which shot waves of gas into Ruggs’s unmasked face. There was a crashing sound of many bands, playing mostly upon cymbals.
All at once the 'U.S.' on the Meter’s collar and the silver bars on his shoulders became incandescent, his body lengthened out like Aladdin’s genie, and he slowly disappeared upward in a whirl of smoke, mounted on the shaft of a rifle grenade—and Ruggs was left alone, holding in his hand a rectangular parchment headed, 'Honorable Discharge from the service of the United States.'
When he raised his head Alice, with sorrowful eyes, was looking him through and through—Alice, whom he had left a month before with the trembling words of acquiescence on her lips and a kiss of hope at his departure. There she stood, shaking a finger of scorn at the paper of Failure in his hand.
The earth was giving way under him. As he sank lower and lower, voices grew abundant about him; and there arose a continuous clatter of rifle-bolts, bayonets, and mess-tins. A bugle somewhere was sounding the assembly. The company in the dusky distance was falling in under arms; the corporals were about to report, and he, Candidate Ruggs, would be absent.
He tried to hurry over dressing himself; but his arms worked in jerks, and when he attempted to run, his legs merely pulled and pushed back and forth heavily in one spot. Frantically he struggled to make headway against the solid air, but in vain. With a supreme effort he lunged forward—and came down at the side of his cot on both feet, with a resounding shock that made the boards of the flimsy barracks rattle.
'For Gawd’s sake,' growled the Duke of Squad 15, rising on his elbow, 'don’t you get enough settin'-up stuff in the daytime without jarrin' your muscles when decent folks sleep?'
'Who fell into the trench?' inquired Naughty, his legal mind going to the bottom of the matter.
'No use tryin' to sleep around here,' continued the Duke with a groan. 'Got to get a pass and lock yourself in a hotel over Saturday and Sunday.'