“Looks like you’d be able to give the Old Man a right good breakfast,” observed the stable sergeant.
“Oh, it’s to be his breakfast,” said Sergeant Gray recklessly.
“It is, is it?” The stable sergeant regarded him with admiration. “Want to bet on it?”
“Just as you like,” was the cool answer.
“Look here,” said the stable sergeant, aware of an audience. “I’ll lay you five to one you don’t breakfast with him at all; ten to one you don’t do it on his invitation, and”—he hesitated for effect—“twenty to one you don’t do it within a week.”
“Good!” said Sergeant Gray, and laid some bills on his knee. “I’d wager I could pull the Crown Prince’s nose at those odds. Then if I do breakfast with him within a week on his invitation you’ll owe me a hundred and seventy-five dollars.”
“I wish my money was as safe in the bank.” But the stable sergeant was vaguely uncomfortable. Those college chaps had a way of putting things over. He went out on the platform and stared uneasily at the flying scenery.
Sergeant Gray folded his new uniform under the mattress of his berth that night. It was bad for the collar, but he did it lest worse befall it. He suspected the troop of jealous designs on it. But he could not fold himself away so easily, and lay diagonally, with two Number Eleven Double E feet in the aisle. At four in the morning he wakened, the cause being a dream that he had for some hours been walking in a puddle and needed to change his shoes.
Still only half awake, he looked at his feet, to perceive that some wag had neatly blackened them with shoe polish from the porter’s closet. He immediately reached under his pillow for his whistle and blew a shrill blast on it, followed by a stentorian roar.
“Roll out, you dirty horsemen! R-r-roll out!” he yelled.