Jim's letters told of scorching heat, of blinding duststorms, and cloudbursts that made lakes of the camps, but nothing else happened except the welter of routine.
The regiments had only police work to do, and the task grew irksome. Men began to think of their neglected businesses. The men who stayed at home were sharing bountifully in the prosperity of the times. The volunteers at the Border were wasting their abilities for fifteen dollars a month.
The officers began to resign by the score, by the hundred. As many enlisted men dropped out as could beg off. Jim could afford to stay; he would not resign, though Kedzie wrote appeals and finally demands that he return to his wretched wife.
Resentment replaced sorrow in her heart. She began to impute ugly motives to his absence. The tradition of the alluring Mexican senorita obsessed her. She imagined him engaged in wild romances with sullen beauties. She was worried about guitar music and stilettoes.
If there were beautiful señoritas there in McAllen, Jim did not see them. His dissipations were visits to the movie shows and excursions for dinner to Mr. and Mrs. Riley's hotel at Mission. Liquor was forbidden to officers and men under dire penalties, and Jim's conviviality was restricted to the soda-water fountains. He became as rabid a consumer of ice-cream cones and sundaes as a matinée girl. It was a burlesque of war to make the angels hold their sides, if the angels could forget the slaughter-house of Europe.
Jim felt that the Government had buncoed him into this comic-opera chorus. He resented the service as an incarceration. But he would not resign. For months he plodded the doleful round of his duties, ate bad food, poured out unbelievable quantities of sweat and easily believable quantities of profanity.
On the big practice hike through the wilderness who that saw him staggering along, choked with alkali dust, knouted by the sun, stabbed by the cactus, carrying two rifles belonging to worn-out soldiers in addition to his own load, looking forward to the privilege of throwing himself down by the roadside for ten minutes' respite, praying for the arrival in camp with its paradise of a little shelter tent and beans and bacon for dinner or for breakfast or supper—who could have believed that he did not have to do it? That he had indeed at home soft luxuries, a rosy little wife, a yacht, and servants to lift his shoes from the floor for him?
It was easier, however, for him to get along thus there where everybody did the same than it was for Kedzie to get along ascetically in New York where nearly everybody she knew was gay.
She might have gone down to Texas to see Jim, but when he wrote her how meager the accommodations were and how harsh the comforts, she pained him by taking his advice. Like almost all the other wives, she stayed at home and made the best of it.
The best was increasingly bad. Her lot, indeed, was none too cheerful. After her clandestine marriage she had confronted her husband's parents, and the result was not satisfactory. She had had no honeymoon, and her husband's friends were chill toward her. Then he marched away and left her for half a year.