“Nope. How about you?”
“Bailey’s got a broken rib, or maybe two or three or four,” yelled Fernald. “Otherwise all present and accounted for. Looks to me as though there was dirty work along the river.”
“I’ll see about a boat for you,” I told him, and started to climb down the tree toward the surging mob beneath me.
I oiled up the mental machinery and had it whirring away at a great rate before I got down. While still ten feet up I gave orders.
“Get back on the field and stay there,” I told the crowd. “And I mean it. Beat it—fast! All but Marston! Wait a minute. Who’s got a boat or knows of one?”
“I—I got one!” stuttered one red-faced man with a gray mustache of the vintage of 1850.
“Get at it quick?”
“Y-Yes.”
“Get it and get out after the two men on the river—quick! Rest of you back on the field.”
They obeyed pronto, talking to each other continuously and with no one listening to anybody else. I had a sort of a kind of a plan of procedure staked out by the time I got down and faced the scaredest, whitest, most shaken-up sergeant in the American or any other army.