“Forget it, Watt. I’ll get your coal. See here, I’ve got leave to-morrow, and I want to go to the city.”
“Well, you can go, for all of me.”
“I want,” said Sergeant Gray plaintively, “to get my picture taken. I want to send it to my mother.”
Suddenly the cook laughed. He leaned over the big serving counter and laughed until he was weak.
“Picture!” he said. “My word! She’ll think the Germans have had you! Say, give me one, will you?”
He went to the refrigerator, however, and brought out a piece of raw beef.
It should have warned Sergeant Gray, lying sulkily on his cot through that bright spring day, the beef over his eye and attracting a multitude of flies, that no one else had suffered visible injury. The boys came and went blithely, each intent on his own affairs. United action had cleaned up the hallway and the stairs. But Sergeant Gray, picked out as Fate’s victim, lay and dozed and struck at flies and—waited.
By night the swelling had gone, but a deep bluish shadow encircled the right eye. Frequent consultation of his shaving mirror told him that he would have the mark for days, but at least he could see. That was something. He got up after dusk and dressed in the new uniform. Then he wandered about the camp.
He felt very lonely. Most of his intimates were on leave. Round the camp the men lounged negligently. Some one with a mandolin was strumming it, and from the theatre, where a movie show was going on, came the rattle of clapping hands. Sergeant Gray hesitated at the door, then he moved on.
What he wanted was some one to talk to, a girl preferably. He wandered past division headquarters, where the chief of staff stood inside a window rolling a cigarette; past the bull pen, surrounded by its fifteen feet of barbed wire and its military police.