“Run along and tell him there’s a returned prisoner here; he’s sick.”
“Right-oh,” said Chucker; and he went.
The battalion doctor came back with the stretcher-bearer, feeling aggrieved that he should be dragged out at the end of a day’s march to see some casual devil who did not belong to his own crowd. Human nature is like that, and this doctor boy was unripe and insolent.
“Hallo, what’s the matter with you?”
Brent was crouching on the box, holding his head between his hands.
“Headache, sir.”
The M.O. looked at him, brought out a thermometer, glanced at the mercury and gave the glass tube a sharp flick.
“Under your tongue. Don’t bite it.”
The sympathetic cook was damning the doctor with a pair of truculent blue eyes, eyes that said “You blighter—I’d like to punch your jaw.” But the officer was not sensitive to psychical impressions; he had left a game of “Slippery Sam,” and he felt Brent’s pulse while Brent sat and sucked the thermometer with an air of vacant helplessness. The glass tube was tweaked out of his mouth, glanced at, and put back in its metal case.
“Hospital for you, boy.”