“We raised Cain. We did all the old tricks, and a good lot of new ones out of our own mighty intellects. We kept an afternoon tea-table up the chimney all winter, not that we liked tea, but we liked to break regulations. Then Carruthers went to New York every Saturday night for months—all one winter—in civilian dress-clothes which he wasn’t supposed to have. His patent leathers lived in my arctic overshoes. There was much other nonsense, but the liveliest was the little Marcus episode. It began when Hill and Carruthers were in our room one night, and we got speculating how far it was possible for cadets—for us—to go. We discussed old scrapes and suggested new ones, and finally one of the four struck out the great idea.”
Captain Fitzhugh’s easy tones went on, full of present joy of life and past whirlwinds of mischief, and as he talked the Hudson River rolled away unseen, for the tale held me. Yet the words of it are as lost as the sunshine of that May morning. The atmosphere of the post, and flavor of cadets’ quarters, the West Point argot, not to be reproduced, the little touches which make local color, these could be rightly given only by an army officer and an ex-cadet. So I must tell the story as it stays in my memory—the simple tale of little Marcus.
I could see the four soldierly lads, in their gray uniforms, as Captain Fitzhugh talked, in the bare, orderly room, and I could imagine how their jaws dropped as the inspired one brought out “the great idea”; for young Machiavelli, searching for a deed of daring, had suggested that they should keep a baby in their rooms for a week. The grotesqueness of the thought made it the more appealing, and at once they planned a beginning. Carruthers was singled out to correspond with an orphan asylum. His aunt in New York was interested in one and he had been there with her and remembered the address. On the instant he wrote, and his letter ran:
“Matron St. Winifred’s Orphan Asylum.
“Dear Madam: My sister and I, being maiden ladies of thirty and seventy years of age—”
“Gosh!” remarked Hill. “Sisters! Why didn’t you make them grandmother and grandchild?”
“What?” Carruthers looked up annoyed. “What’s the trouble? Oh—well, that is far apart. I’ll join the dames.” He scratched a figure. “Fifty and fifty-one—that’s safe, isn’t it?”
“Go ahead,” was the consensus of opinion.
“Of fifty and fifty-one years of age, and being very lonely alone together, as we have neither of us ever succeeded in getting married—”
“Or seldom,” murmured Hill.