When he went into the lower squad room a sort of chant greeted him from the beds: “Where, oh where’s the sergeant been?”
And the reply shouted lustily: “Out getting measured for a shave.”
He undressed quietly, and salvaging the piece of beefsteak from under his pillow got into bed and placed it carefully over his eye.
III
But tragedy had marked Sergeant Gray for its own. At reveille he rolled over, yawned and without lifting himself reached up to the pocket of his blouse and retrieved his whistle.
He blew it and shouted as usual: “R-r-roll out, you dirty horsemen! R-r-roll out!”
Then, arms under his head, he lay and dreamed. Round the day to come he wove little fantasies of the new uniform, and money in his pocket, and twenty-three and a half hours’ leave, and—the girl in the little car. His pass he had already secured through the top sergeant. It had been, with others on the pass list, O.K’d by the captain and re-O.K’d by the military police. At ten-thirty that morning Sergeant Gray would be a free man.
He made a huge breakfast, and careful inspection showed the eye greatly improved. And he whistled blithely while laying out his things for the official inspection, comparing his belongings carefully with a list in his hand. Nothing was to go wrong that day, nothing mar the perfection of it or curtail his leave.
But he failed to count the camp quartermaster; and that Destiny, which had taken him in hand forty-eight hours ago, was making of him her toy.
Now camp quartermasters are but human. They have their good days and their bad, and sometimes it rather gets on their nerves, the eternal examining and determining, for instance, that every man of perhaps thirty thousand possesses in perfect condition: