Would Gwendolen have been so eager to redeem some dried-up middle-aged sinner? I don’t know. At any rate, in her solicitude for the spotless Leonidas, she was abreast with the advanced Philanthropy which holds prevention better than cure. Of course, not even to the most evil-minded could scandal arise from any of this. But when you see a wife of nineteen playing the organ for a trooper of twenty-two, and a husband of forty-five constantly remarking that a man is always as young as he feels, why, then you are at no great distance from comedy, and the joke draws nearer when the wife is anxious that the trooper should not feel the want of his mother, and the trooper retains the limpid innocence of the watermelon. The ladies of the Post tried to be indignant that an officer’s wife should so much associate herself with enlisted men, but they could only laugh—and hush when the captain came by, and the men in barracks laughed—and hushed when the captain came by, and the poor captain knew it all. Meanwhile, the melodeon played on, the watermelons lifted their harmless hymns, and in the heart of Leonidas the Secretary’s speech dwelled like honey but like gall in the heart of the captain. Had Captain Stone dreamed what sweet familiarity the hymns were breeding, he—but he did not dream, hence was his awakening all the more pronounced.
The day it came had made an ill beginning with him. He had walked unexpectedly into the kitchen before breakfast, and found there his Chinaman putting a finishing crust on the breakfast rolls. He had never been aware of such a process. He had always particularly enjoyed the crust. The Chinaman had just reached the point where he withdrew the hot rolls from the oven and sprayed them suddenly with cold water from his mouth. There had ensued a dreadful time in the kitchen, and no rolls for breakfast and no Chinaman for dinner, and even as late as five o’clock the captain’s mustache had not completely flattened down. Leonidas should have observed this as he came up the captain’s steps with a message from the chaplain for the captain’s wife. They were waiting for her to come over and play the melodeon for Sunday’s anthem.
“Is Sistah Stone here?” Leonidas inquired.
“WHO?” said the captain, rising from his chair, which fell backward with the movement.
“Is Sistah Stone here?” repeated Leonidas, mildly. “The chaplain says—”
You will meet the most conflicting accounts of the spot where Leonidas first landed on firm ground after leaving the captain’s boot. The colonel’s orderly, who was standing in front of the colonel’s gate four houses farther up the line, deposed that he “thought he heard a something but didn’t see what made it.” Mrs. Phillips declared she was sitting on her porch two houses down the line, and “it looked just like diving from a spring-board.” These were the only two disinterested witnesses. The afflicted Leonidas claimed that he had gone from the porch clean over the front gate, and Captain Stone said that he didn’t know and didn’t care, but that if the gate story was true, then he had projected one hundred and sixty pounds forty measured feet and felt younger than ever.
The version which Jones gave has (to me) always seemed wholly satisfactory. “Don’t y’u go sittin’ up nights over it,” said Jones. “Nobody’ll never prove where he struck. But what
“Is Sistah Stone heah?” Leonidas inquired