Page:The American Magazine volume LXIV.djvu/170

156 "Mamma!"

And Letty dropped mamma's hand, and flew back to Mrs. Bill. In the army, you have to cling with ardor to the temporary objects of your adoration while you have 'em, before fate removes them, or you. And now they must leave Mrs. Billy!

"The battery is to march overland with the guns," explained mamma. "Your father wants you and me to stop off on the way north to see Aunt Emma, Letty. She isn't enthusiastic over me, but she'll overlook that to get you, though I'm sure I'm more grateful to her than I ever dreamed I could be to any one."

The eyes of Mrs. Bill were filling, for she was new to this thing of losing your friends just about the time you have really made them.

But here were orders, and besides, to the ones ordered, there is the allurement of the unknown ahead, and Letty dropped Mrs. Bill's pretty hand, and with her own in mamma's went home.

But with orders, calamity fell upon the battery barracks.

Private Garr took it hardest, gnawing his finger-nails in perplexity, they said, as he hunted a way out of the situation, for Garr, having brought the goat at a rope's end into camp back there in Cuba, stood in the place of a parent to Sylvanus, and on a march overland the dogs may ride on the caissons, but you can't, so to speak, take your goat on the guns!

Of course the post carpenter may be relied on to loot enough lumber to crate him for shipping, but crating isn't all; it costs to ship a crated goat with sides like barrels, and there is not always a large showing of velvet on hand by the middle of the stretch between pay-days, even when all available cash be produced and lumped together and the results added up. Yet to become separated from your goat is a thing no soldier-man is willing to contemplate. At the mere threatening of such a possibility, man after man went out and boxed a round or two with Sylly that he might be reassured. That is, all went but Garr; they left him chewing his nails and hunting a way out of it.

In course of time he joined the ring of boxers, too. With a sanguine coloring often goes an inventive spirit, and on seeing the lips of Private Garr amiably pursed, and the eyes of him innocently bland, the hearts of his messmates cheered. Reading the signs in the countenance of Private Garr, the inference they deduced was, that since they were going, Sylvanus, the goat, was evidently going too.

If you impress around the necessity of keeping news of orders to march from spreading outside of post, you can confidently rely upon the ol' man hearing about it before night, just as you want him to. And when there is scarce money by the time you've squared with washerwoman, tailor, post exchange, and your friends, to send your mascot goat ahead, why, it is the graceful act to bequeath him to your cavalry brother-soldiers in Troop B left behind. And by sufficiently impressing the secrecy of this around barracks too, you can depend upon it getting to the ol' man by sundown also. Nor would it increase the ol' man's affection for the goat to hear it.

Letitia did not learn of these things until afterward, by which time the story was about the garrison and the occasion of wide, if unofficial rejoicing, but she did supply the details to Mrs. Billy at the last.

According to Letty, the night following that on which the news leaked out to the ol' man, something got into that person's yard by starlight, and, according to his telling, ate up his seedling tomato plants even to the tin cans in which they had been sprouted.

Moreover, this same demolishing something had danced with a satyr-like capering and ecstasy on window-sash hot-beds to the demolishment of cabbage and sweet potato plants within. And the next morning it spread over post, at least in the battery's quarters, that the ol' man had cunningly risen to the extent of four dollars to a murderous proposition made him by a hitherto model soldier-man, named Garr, not at all given to frequenting him, that Sylvanus be secretly delivered to him just before the planned bequeathal of him to Troop B, thereupon mysteriously and forever to disappear.

The same day this news of the ol' man's generosity spread abroad. Private Garr went over to town. His report to his mates on return was that the express clerk estimated that it would cost eight dollars for Sylly to disappear.

Whereupon it spread about barracks again, how important it was that news of the moving of the battery being even nearer at hand than had been understood, should