The general was still in a very bad temper, and his left ear was swollen and purple. He lost no time in the attack—he believed in striking swiftly and hard—and he read off, from an excellent memory, the tale of Sergeant Gray’s various sins of commission. But he did not go so far as he meant to go, at that. In the first place, Gray was an excellent noncom, and in the second place there was something in the boy’s upstanding figure and clear if worried eyes that, coupled with another of the excellent cigars, inclined him to leniency.
“But remember this, Gray,” he finished severely, “I don’t usually meddle with these things. But I’ve got my eye on you. One more infraction of discipline, and you’ll lose your stripes.”
“Yes, sir,” said Sergeant Gray.
He was intolerably virtuous all that day.
Late that afternoon they detrained two miles from the new camp, and marched along, singing lustily songs that sound better than they look in print, and joyously stretching legs too long confined. It mattered nothing to them that the temporary camp was untidy and badly drained; that the general passing in a limousine was reading an order that meant an emergency abroad, into which they were to be thrown at once; that a certain percentage of them would never come back; and that a certain other percentage would return, never again to tramp the open road or to see the blue sky overhead.
But a girl in a little car trailing in the dust behind the staff cars thought of those things, and almost ran over the company goat, Eloise, because of tears.
“Darned little idiot!” murmured Sergeant Gray, and gave his last doughnut to Eloise.
There was no thrill, no increase over the regular seventy-six beats a minute of his heart to tell him that love had just passed by in a pink hat.
Until eighty-thirty that night Sergeant Gray was obnoxiously virtuous. He had met an English noncom in the camp, and was studiously endeavouring to copy that gentleman’s carriage and dignity. And the attraction of the new surroundings had turned the attention of the troop from him and his wager to other things. A discovery, too, of certain conditions in the barracks distracted them.
“A week here,” growled the second mess sergeant, “and we’ll all have to be dipped.”