For the good of the service Mother offered to retire the Captain on half pay, and give him free lodging on the garret stair, but he scorned the proposal, and you backed him in his stand. All his life he had been a soldier. Now, with war and rumors of war rife in the land, should he, Captain Jinks, a private in the Grenadier Guards, lay down his arms for the piping peace of a garret stair? No, by gad, sir! No! And he stayed; and, strangest thing of all, he was yet to fight and stand guard and suffer as he had never done before.
But while the Captain thus sadly went down hill, the Rag Doll retired to a modest villa in the closet country up-stairs. It was quiet there, and she could rest her shattered nerves. Whether she blamed herself for her rejected lover's downfall, or whether it was mere petulance at the social triumphs of the waxen blonde is a question open to debate. Sentimentalists will find the former theory more to their fancy, but, the blonde and her friends told a different tale. Be that as it may, the Rag Doll went away.
January passed in barracks; then February and March, with only an occasional scouting after cattle-thieves and brigand bands. The Captain chafed at such inactivity.
"War! You call this war!" his very bristling manner seemed to say. "By gad! sir, when I was in the trenches before..."
It was fine then to see the Captain and Grandfather—both grizzled veterans with tales to tell—side by side before the library fire. When Grandfather told the story of Johnny Reb in the tall grass, the Captain was visibly moved.
"Jinks," Grandfather would say—"Jinks, you know how it is yourself—when the bacon's wormy and the coffee's thin, and there's a man with a gun before you and a girl with a tear behind."
And at the mention of the girl and the tear the Captain would turn away.
Spring came, and with it the marching orders for which you and the Captain had yearned so long. There was a stir in the barracks that morning. The Captain was drunk again, it is true, but drunk this time with joy. He could not march in the ranks—he was too far gone for that—so you stationed him on a wagon to guard the commissary stores.
A blast from the bugle—Assembly—and you fell into line.
"Forward—March!"