“Come, Dick, don’t be a jackass,” advised Trefethen. “It’s business—I’m lending it to him—I’ll skin you both yet.” And then, as he still hesitated, with wide troubled eyes on the great man’s face, Trefethen put out his hand and found the football captain’s fingers, and twisted them into the fraternity grip—and the old college boy smiled at the young one. “Brothers, aren’t we?” he demanded. “You’ve done a lot more for me than I can do for you,” and with that, a flash of misty mischief coming into his eyes. “‘By ginger,’” quoted Marcus Trefethen, “let me ‘make a try at least not to be a disgrace to my Alma Mater.’”
LITTLE MARCUS
LITTLE MARCUS
Captain Fitzhugh told me this story as we sat in the last seat of the last car of the Empire State Express, west-bound, and flung off the line of the Hudson River Railway from the reel of the gilt-iron observation-car just outside. Misty mountains lay on turquoise sky, cotton-wool clouds hung over the broad silver of the river; patches of vivid green—yellow-green of juicy grass, gray-green of shadowy willows, black-green of pine-trees—shouted aloud of the spring. “There’s the old Point!” Captain Fitzhugh said suddenly, breaking off a sentence to say it.
The low mass of the West Point stables lay gray across the river, and beside it the round-arched end of the Riding School. The Memorial Building, new and magnificent, stood higher up, and the slender shaft of the War Monument shot above the trees by the Parade Ground. A bit of the hotel showed near it. If you knew the Point you could see the whole well-groomed place through the scrap of foreground—the crossing paths, the sweeping drives, the big empty Parade, the row of officers’ quarters that looked across from white-curtained, hospitable windows.
Captain Fitzhugh shook his head with a reminiscent smile, and stared dreamily at the fast vanishing hillside. Then it was gone, and he turned to me. “I remembered a tale of my youth in that two minutes,” he explained.
“I was looking at Flirtation Walk and thinking of the blue eyes and brown that have made my poor old leather heart beat, under those trees. Then I got around to the corps, and my class, and then suddenly I remembered little Marcus. Do you think it would bore you to hear about little Marcus?” It was unnecessary to answer. He went on. “It was the worst hole I was ever in, and I used to be an expert on holes. Duncan was my wife that year—Jack Duncan of the ‘Fighting 9th.’”
“Your wife that year!”
“You don’t know the expression?” asked Captain Fitzhugh. “The cadets call their roommates wives.” He smiled. “Well, then, Duncan was my wife, you see, and Hill and Carruthers were across the hall, and we four were thicker than thieves. The tactical officers had a bad time with us, for what one didn’t think of another did, and the rest covered up his tracks.”
“What did you do?” I asked, settling myself comfortably into my blue velvet chair.