Page:The American Magazine volume LXIV.djvu/169

Rh that spread over post that an enlisted man should do so terrible a thing!

Letty did her young best to set Mrs. Bill right. What Smith, under ordinary conditions, according to Letitia, would have done, was ask his squad-leader, or, better still, ask his sergeant direct, for leave to speak to his captain. She even went into grave and minute particulars.

"What in—" well, it wasn't a pretty word, mamma wouldn't like her to say it, even for Mrs. Billy, "do you want to report to him now?" would have been Private Smith's likeliest reception from Sergeant O'Grady.

To which Letitia thought Smith most likely would have said, "What is it to you what I want to report?"

And here Mrs. Bill broke in, pardonably curious to know what it was Private Smith wished to report. But Letty didn't know that. She only knew he had been turned down and was kicking.

Later everybody knew about it, for when Smith ended in trouble, he told his chaplain, who told it in his turn. Up to then Smith had had an unreasoning and crooked prejudice against chaplains, and also a notion his officers were all against him. There's many a Smith gets a distorted idea so.

"You can't make easy fools like Garr and Barker and Batts understand," he explained. "Things have been glossed over in our part of barracks too long. Batts went to Bayard seven months ago, and Barker followed Batts. I've been here long enough to know what ought to've been done, and if that rowing big medico sent to Manila last year had a been here, would of been done. I don't care who detailed who, or what, to be done about it; I know it wasn't done. And now Garr's hacking. And you couldn't expect an O'Grady who don't want enemies above, to report a thing like that, now, could you?"

But Smith told all of this to his chaplain later. Right now O'Grady had turned him down for the third time, and he was kicking.

It was the afternoon when Letitia was telling Mrs. Billy all this, as they sat together on the steps of that lady's front porch, that mamma came over cross yards, and reaching the porch steps, stopped, portentous news in her eyes. Letitia left Mrs. Bill's side, and hurried down to slip her fingers in her mother's while that lady told it.

"Now, Mrs. Bill," said mamma, smiling half-heartedly, for when you are just getting on your feet financially, you see it's discouraging to have to move in just eleven months from the time it cost to move here—"now, Mrs. Army Bride, you'll begin to better understand why we older women haven't your array of pretty breakables. Such things won't stand too many cratings. We've our orders, Letty."