“Yes, he wanted to fight with us,” shouted Heinze, indignantly. “As soon as he got into the camp, he wanted to fight with us.”
Laguerre made an exclamation of impatience, and rose unsteadily from the gun-carriage.
“Silence!” he commanded. “I tell you I cannot listen to you now. I will give these men a hearing after roll-call. In the meantime if they are spies, they have seen too much. Place them under guard; and if they try to escape, shoot them.”
I gave a short laugh and turned to Aiken.
“That’s the first intelligent military order I’ve heard yet,” I said.
Aiken scowled at me fearfully, and Reeder and Heinze gasped. General Laguerre had caught the words, and turned his eyes on me. Like the real princess who could feel the crumpled rose-leaf under a dozen mattresses, I can feel it in my bones when I am in the presence of a real soldier. My spinal column stiffens, and my fingers twitch to be at my visor. In spite of their borrowed titles, I had smelt out the civilian in Reeder and had detected the non-commissioned man in Heinze, and just as surely I recognized the general officer in Laguerre.
So when he looked at me my heels clicked together, my arm bent to my hat and fell again to my trouser seam, and I stood at attention. It was as instinctive as though I were back at the Academy, and he had confronted me in the uniform and yellow sash of a major-general.
“And what do you know of military orders, sir,” he demanded, in a low voice, “that you feel competent to pass upon mine?”
Still standing at attention, I said: “For the last three years I have been at West Point, sir, and have listened to nothing else.”
“You have been at West Point?” he said, slowly, looking at me in surprise and with evident doubt. “When did you leave the Academy?”