But the M. O., at the various halts, waited in vain for the chaplain to appear.
On arriving at the camp, after a long struggle, he succeeded in sending back an Army Service waggon to bring in the stragglers, but just as the waggon was about to leave, he heard coming up the road, a party stepping out briskly to the music of their own whistling. In the rear of the party marched the chaplain, laden down with one man's rifle and another man's kit-bag.
“They're all here, sir,” said Corporal Thom to the M. O., with a distinct note of triumph in his voice. “All here, sir,” he repeated, as he observed the sergeant major standing at the doctor's side.
“Well done, corporal,” said the sergeant major. “You brought 'em all in? That means that no man has fallen out on our first march in this country.”
The corporal made no reply, but later on, he explained the matter to the sergeant major.
“It's that Sky Pilot of ours, sir,” he said. “Blowed if he'd let us fall out.”
“Kept you marching, eh?”
“No, it's his chocolate and his jaw, but more his jaw than his chocolate. He's got lots of both. I was all in. I'd been sick all day in the train. Couldn't eat a bite. Well, the first thing, he gives me a cake of his chocolate. Then he sets himself down in the mud beside me, and me wishin' all the time he'd go on and leave me for the waggon to pick up. Then he gives me a cigarette, and then he begins to talk.”
“Talk, what about?”
“Damned if I know, but the first thing I knew I was tellin' him about the broncho bustin',—that's my job, you know—and how I won out from Nigger Jake in the Calgary Stampede, until I was that stuck on myself that I said: 'Well, sir, we'd better get a move on,' and up he gets with my kit-bag on his back. By and by, we picks up another lame duck and then another, feedin' 'em with chocolate and slingin' his jaw, and when we was at the limit, he halts us outside one of them stone shacks and knocks at the door. 'No soldiers here,' snaps the red-headed angel, shuttin' the door right in his face. Then he opens the door and steps right in where she could see him, and starts to talk to her, and us listening out in the rain. Say! In fifteen minutes we was all standin' up to a feed of coffee and buns, and then he gets Harry Hobbs whistlin' and singin', and derned if we couldn't have marched to Berlin. Say! He's a good one, ain't no quitter, and he won't let nobody else be a quitter.”