Twenty-three and a Half Hours' Leave

The Headquarters Troop were preparing to leave camp and move towards the East, where at an Atlantic port they would take ship and the third step toward saving democracy. Now the Headquarters Troop are a cavalry organisation, their particular function being, so far as the lay mind can grasp it, to form a circle round the general and keep shells from falling on him. Not that this close affiliation gives them any right to friendly relations with that aloof and powerful personage.

“It just gives him a few more to yell at that can’t yell back,” grumbled the stable sergeant. He had been made stable sergeant because he had been a motorcycle racer. By the same process of careful selection the chief mechanic had once kept a livery stable.

The barracks hummed day and night. By day boxes were packed, containing the military equipment of horses and men in wartime. By night tired noncoms pored over pay rolls and lists, and wrote, between naps on the table, such thrilling literature as this:

“Sergeant Gray: fr. D. to Awol. 10 A. M., 6–1–’18.

“Sergeant Gray: fr. Awol. to arrest, pp. 2. Memo. Hdq. Camp 6–1–’18 to 6–2–’18.”

Which means, interpreted, that Sergeant Gray was absent without leave from duty at ten A. M. on the first of June, 1918, and that on his return he was placed under arrest, said arrest lasting from the first to the second of June.

On the last night in camp, at a pine table in a tiny office cut off from the lower squad room, Sergeant Gray made the above record against his own fair name, and sitting back surveyed it grimly. It was two A. M. Across from him the second mess sergeant was dealing in cans and pounds and swearing about a missing cleaver.

“Did you ever think,” reflected Sergeant Gray, leaning back in his chair and tastefully drawing a girl’s face on his left thumb-nail, “that the time would come when you’d be planning bran muffins for the Old Man’s breakfast? What’s a bran muffin, anyhow?”

“Horse feed.”

“Ever eat one?”

“No. Stop talking, won’t you?”

Sergeant Gray leaned back and stretched his long arms high above his head.

“I’ve got to talk,” he observed. “If I don’t I’ll go to sleep. Lay you two dollars to one I’m asleep before you are.”

“Go to the devil!” said the second mess sergeant peevishly.

“Never had breakfast with the Old Man, did you?” inquired Sergeant Gray, beginning on his forefinger with another girl’s face.

There was no reply to his question. The second mess sergeant was completely immersed in beans.

“Think the Old Man likes me,” went on Sergeant Gray meditatively. “It’s about a week now since he told me I was a disgrace to the uniform. How’d I know I was going to sneeze in his horse’s ear just as he was climbing on?”

“Suffering snakes!” cried the second mess sergeant. “Go to bed! You’re delirious.”

Sergeant Gray put a dimple in the girl’s cheek and surveyed it critically.

“Yep. The old boy’s crazy about me,” he ruminated aloud. “Asked me the other day if I thought I’d fight the Germans as hard as I fought work.”

“Probably be asking you to breakfast,” observed the second mess sergeant, beginning on a new sheet. “He’s in the habit of having noncoms to eat with him.”

The subtlety of this passed over Sergeant Gray’s head. He was carefully adding a small ear to his drawing, an ear which resembled an interrogation point. But a seed had been dropped on the fertile soil of his mind. He finished, yawned again and grinned.