Читать книгу The Young Wild-Fowlers - Castlemon Harry - Страница 6
CHAPTER IV.
AT SCHOOL AGAIN.
ОглавлениеThe last time we saw Don and Bert Gordon, they had just returned to Mississippi after having spent a few weeks with their friend Curtis in his far northern home. They had come back with more honors as students, soldiers and hunters than they had ever hoped to win. Eight months’ hard study, combined with strict attention to their duties, had made Don major of the academy battalion and Bert first lieutenant of his company. The latter had barely escaped mutilation from the teeth and claws of a wounded lucivee, while Don had smelled powder, heard the whistle of bullets, seen a murderous-looking bowie-knife flourished before his eyes by a ruffian who tried his best to use it on his person, and those who were with him during that trying ordeal declared, as one boy, that he never flinched. More than that, he had performed a feat during his sojourn in Maine of which any veteran hunter would have been proud to boast. He had killed a full-grown moose, whose antlers had been given an honored place in his mother’s dining-room.
“I don’t believe Don shot that moose himself,” said Lester Brigham, when he heard of it. “Some old hunter shot it for him, and he comes home and palms it off as a trophy of his own skill with the rifle. He tried hard to get up a reputation on the strength of that fight with the rioters, which really did not amount to any thing; but after Williams and I risked our lives to save the crew of the Mystery, Don and his crowd had not another word to say. There was danger in that undertaking, I beg you to remember, and if Don and his brother had been the heroes of it, they never would leave off talking about it.”
Lester was standing in the Rochdale post-office waiting for his mail when he said this, and Enoch Williams and Jones were with him. Around them was a crowd of boys, who had so often heard them tell of the wonderful exploits they had performed during their runaway expedition, that they were tired of listening to them. Knowing these three fellows as well as we do, it is hardly necessary to say that, while magnifying their own achievements, they did not scruple to speak in the most contemptuous terms of what Don Gordon had done, and to declare, in so many words, that his promotion and Bert’s was owing entirely to favoritism. They wore their uniforms on all occasions, carried themselves very stiffly when they walked, and tried in every way to impress the Rochdale boys with a sense of their importance. They succeeded with some, while others, who were civil enough to their faces, laughed at them behind their backs. The Mississippi boys were not lacking in common sense if they did live in the country. Williams and Jones were getting ready to go home now, their preparations being somewhat hastened by the arrival of Don and his brother, whom, for reasons of their own, they did not care to meet.
“We heard down here that that fight with the rioters was a pretty severe one,” observed Fred Packard.
“We don’t doubt it,” answered Jones. “It is very natural for some people to praise themselves when there is no one to do it for them. I would be perfectly willing to go through one just like it, and take my chances.”
“So would I,” exclaimed Enoch.
“Here too,” chimed in Lester, puffing out his cheeks and looking very brave and warlike indeed. “And I wouldn’t brag about it after I got home, either.”
“Well, then, why did you not go to Hamilton with Don and the rest?” inquired Fred.
“Because I couldn’t. The third company went, and I belonged to the fourth. I volunteered to go, and so did my two friends here, but the superintendent has his favorites among the students, and of course they had to go, no matter if they were the biggest cowards in the academy.”
“I conclude that you were just spoiling for a fight,” said Joe Packard, with a smile that was highly exasperating to Lester and his two friends. “If that was the case, what made you pull your head under the bed-clothes and pretend that you were ill when the bugle sounded that false alarm?”
“I didn’t do any thing of the kind; did I, boys?” cried Lester, appealing to his guests who were prompt to sustain him in his denial of the humiliating charge. “If Don Gordon told you any story of that sort, he is a mean, sneaking——”
“Hold on!” interrupted Fred. “Don is a friend of mine, and somehow I can’t bear to hear him abused. Besides——”
Here Fred stopped and jerked his thumb over his shoulder toward the open door. The boys looked, and saw Don and Bert in the act of hitching their ponies to a tree on the opposite side of the road. They were dressed in citizens’ clothes, and although they did not walk with the regulation step, nor turn square corners, any one could see at a glance that they had been under military training, and that they had paid some attention to it.
Lester took just one look at them, and then leaned his elbow on the show-case and rested his head on his hand. He had evidently forgotten what he was going to say about Don.
“Another thing, Gordon has never said a word to my brother or me about you since he came home,” continued Fred. “He isn’t that sort. He is much too manly to try to build himself up by pulling others down, and that is more than I can say for some lads with whom I happen to be acquainted.”
“Then who told you that ridiculous tale about me?” demanded Lester, wincing a little under the covert rebuke contained in Fred’s last words.
“Our information came from a very reliable source,” was the rather unsatisfactory reply. “I know we live a good many miles from Bridgeport; but we manage to keep pretty well posted in some things that happen there.”
“His uncle told him all about it,” said Enoch, turning his back toward Fred, and speaking in a low voice. “No one else could have done it, if Don or Bert didn’t.”
The “uncle” referred to was the Mr. Packard who owned the Sylph—the yacht in which Enoch and his band of deserters made their runaway voyage. He was an old man with all a boy’s love of fun. He was very fond of his nephews, Fred and Joe, with whom he corresponded regularly, and it is reasonable to suppose that if anything amusing or exciting happened at the academy, he did not neglect to speak of it in his letters.
“And we took Mr. Packard’s relatives off the Mystery and saved them from going to the bottom of the bay with her!” exclaimed Lester, in deep disgust.
“But that was after the fight, you know,” whispered Enoch. “He wouldn’t say anything against our courage now, I’ll bet you.”
“No matter. He has talked about us, and told things that his good sense, if he had any, ought to have led him to conceal, and I’ll never go near his house again. I think Fred and Joe might treat us with a little more respect after what we did for their relatives when the Mystery was wrecked.”
As it is possible the reader may think so too, we hasten to assure him that it was not Fred’s fault nor Joe’s that they could not be friends with Lester and Enoch. These two had a faculty of driving every decent boy away from them. When they arrived in Rochdale, Fred and Joe lost no time in calling upon them, to tell them how grateful they were for what they had done for their friends when their lives were in peril, but Lester showed them very plainly, by his actions, that he did not thank them for the visit. They wouldn’t have anything to do with him when he was plain Lester Brigham, he said; but now that he was Lester Brigham the hero, they were anxious to cultivate his acquaintance. That was something to which he could not consent; and so he, and Enoch and Jones following his example, snubbed Fred and Joe most royally as often as the opportunity was presented. If the high-spirited Packard boys grew tired of such treatment after a while, and showed Lester and his boastful guests up in their true colors, can anybody blame them?
“Here comes Don,” said Jones, in a suppressed voice. “Don’t salute him.”
“Of course not!” exclaimed Lester, who seemed to grow angry at the mere mention of such a thing. “We are not at the academy now, and we are just as good as he is.”
“Hallo, major!” cried all the Rochdale boys, as Don and his brother came into the store. “Glad to see you back safe and sound, and none the worse for your fight with the rioters. You don’t act a bit stuck up if you are a big officer.”
“Just listen to ’em!” whispered Lester, who could not conceal his indignation. “The world is full of toadies.”
“And always will be,” answered Jones, who was equally angry and disgusted. “Whenever some fortunate accident raises a chap a round or two, you will always find plenty who are willing to bow to him.”
“Well, major,” said Fred Packard, “I hear that—”
“O, for goodness sake, drop that,” interrupted Don. “Drop it, I say, or I’ll not talk to you. I am at home now, and I want to forget school and every thing connected with it until the time comes to go back.”
Don’s friends knew very well that he cared nothing for his military title, except in so far as it marked his standing at the academy, and that was the reason they addressed him by it—simply to bother him. They gathered in a group about him and Bert, and Lester and his two friends being left to themselves, secured their mail as soon as the window was opened, and left the post-office, looking straight before them as they passed out at the door, and giving the brothers no chance to salute them, even if it had been their place to do so.
“Now, Don,” said one of the boys, who had not an opportunity to speak to him before, “is it true that Lester and Williams took the crew off Mr. Packard’s yacht at the risk of their own lives?”
“It is,” answered Don, readily. “Bert and I were there and saw it all. It was a brave act, and everybody who knows the circumstances says so.”
“But still Lester pulled the quilts over his head and feigned illness when the bugle sounded; and Jones, who belonged to your company, was left behind because he hid in one of the coal-bins,” said Joe Packard.
As Don could not deny this, he said nothing about it. He took his mail as soon as he could get it, and then he and Bert mounted their ponies and rode homeward, accompanied by the Packard boys.
The two brothers spent this vacation in much the same way they spent the first one after their northern friends, Hopkins, Curtis, and Egan had gone home. Bert studied hard in the hope of being able to exchange his single bar for a captain’s shoulder-strap at the next examination, but Don never looked into the book. He had earned a long rest, and had come home to enjoy it in his own way. He rode and hunted to his heart’s content, swung Indian clubs, punched the sand-bag with heavy dumb-bells, and ran a mile every pleasant day at the top of his speed with a view of lowering the academy record during the next encampment. When the time came to go back he was ready, and his mother saw him depart without any misgivings. Don had showed her that he could behave himself, if he set about it in dead earnest, and now that he had tried it for a whole year, and made many friends and won his promotion by it, she was firm in her belief that he was well started on the right road at last. Don thought so too, but he did not for a moment relax his vigilance. He could not afford to if he were going to make Egan’s prediction come out true, and wear the lieutenant-colonel’s shoulder-straps during his last year at the academy. If he desired to use the authority and enjoy the privileges those shoulder-straps would give him, it was necessary that he should win them at the very next examination.
A few days before they left Rochdale, Don and Bert rode over to Lester Brigham’s to see if he would be ready to start when they did—not because they wanted him for traveling companion, but because they thought it would be a friendly thing for them to do; but Lester received them in so freezing a manner, and showed so plainly that he did not care for their company, that they left him to himself and set out for Bridgeport alone.
“I don’t want anything to do with them or the crowd they run with,” soliloquized Lester, as he saw them ride away. “I shall have friends enough at the academy without them. Enoch said he knew of two or three good fellows, who had about half made up their minds to sign the muster-roll this year, and if he brings them with him, they may be able to think up some way in which we can enjoy ourselves. We have already tried the only plan I could think of, and I shouldn’t have thought of that if it had not been for Huggins.”
Lester reached Bridgeport without any mishap, and when he stepped out of the carriage that took him and his trunk from the railroad depot to the academy, he found Williams and Jones waiting for him. The “good fellows” were there also—three of them, and of course they were boys after Enoch’s own heart. They lived on Long Island, and Enoch went to school with them before his father moved down into Maryland. They had not come to the academy to learn, but because they wanted to take part in the sports and pastimes which fell to the lot of the students, and which Enoch had described in glowing colors; although he had never said a word concerning the long, tiresome hours of study and drill that came six days in the week as regularly as the deep tones of the big bell rang out from the cupola. They wanted the honor of belonging to the school, a portion of whose members had stood up so manfully in defense of law and order; but they never stopped to ask themselves how they would act, should they be called upon to perform a similar service.
“Here we are!” exclaimed Enoch, as he grasped Lester’s hand in both his own and shook it cordially, “and I have good cause for complaint already. That little snipe, Bert Gordon, has been detailed to assign the boys to their rooms (more favoritism right at the start, you see), and when I asked him if he would be kind enough to chum you on me, he replied he did not think it would be just the thing to do.”
“Why wouldn’t it?” demanded Lester, after he had shaken hands with Enoch’s three friends, who were introduced to him as Dale, Barry, and Morris.
“Because it suits His Royal Highness to keep you two apart,” said Jones. “He thinks you wouldn’t study anything but plans for mischief.”
“Is that any of his business?” cried Lester, who was very indignant. “He and Don throw on altogether too many airs. I wish we could think up some way to get those straps off his shoulders.”
“That is simply impossible,” said Enoch. “He will be the ranking captain next year, and Don will be lieutenant-colonel. You wait and see. They have succeeded in getting on the blind side of the teachers, and their promotion is a dead sure thing.”
“Couldn’t he be drawn into a scrape that would do the business for him?” asked Dale.
Lester and Jones both answered that he could not. Bert was one of the good little boys, and had never learned how to disobey any of the rules. There had been a time, they said, when his brother Don could be induced to join in anything that had fun and danger in it; but he was major of the battalion now, and besides, Egan and the fellows who belonged to that crowd had so much influence over him that it would be useless to approach him on the subject of “scrapes.”
“And dangerous as well,” chimed in Enoch. “He has an uncomfortable habit of telling the truth at all times and on all occasions, and if he is caught, he will own right up.”
“He did that very thing the year before I came here, and brought some jolly boys into serious trouble by it,” observed Lester.
“Humph!” exclaimed Dale, contemptuously. “I wouldn’t have any intercourse with such a milk-sop.”
“He’s no milk-sop, and there is no boy in school who dares call him that to his face, either,” said Jones, who, in his heart, admired Don Gordon, and earnestly wished that he was like him in some respects. “It is true that he has too much honor to lie himself out of a scrape, but he won’t go back on a friend.”
“I don’t see how you make that out,” snapped Lester, who never could bear to hear a civil word said about either of the Gordon boys.
“Why, when he was hauled up for allowing Clarence Duncan and Tom Fisher, and all the rest of the guard-runners to go by him one night when he was on duty, didn’t he come very near being sent down for refusing to give their names when he was ordered to do so?” demanded Jones.
“Some of you fellows make a great fuss about that,” said Lester, with a gesture of impatience. “One would think, by the way you harp on it, that Gordon is the only boy in the world who has the courage to stand by a school-mate. If he was so very anxious to keep the guard-runners out of trouble, why did he not say that no one went by him while he had charge of the floor? That’s what any decent boy would have done.”
“And that same decent boy would have found himself brought up with a round turn directly,” replied Jones, “for the superintendent knew right where to look to find every fellow who broke the rules that night. Don did the best that could have been done under the circumstances, for Duncan was bound to go down any way.”
While Lester and his friends were talking in this way, they were standing at the foot of the wide stone steps that led up to the front door of the academy; and it was not until their teeth began to chatter that they thought of going into the building to get out of reach of the keen, cutting wind which came over the frozen surface of the river. Gathering about the huge stove in the hall, they threw off their gloves and mufflers and looked about them. There was a large pile of trunks in one end of the hall, and Bert Gordon, assisted by one of the corporals, was trying his best to get rid of it; but fast as his four stalwart porters worked, the pile grew in size, for a train had just passed through the village, and carriage-loads of students and wagon-loads of luggage were arriving every minute. Some of the new comers shook hands with Lester and his two cronies and were introduced to the boys from Long Island; but the majority of them, although they crowded up to the stove to get warm, did not notice Lester and his companions at all.
“Do they feel too big to speak to a fellow?” whispered Dale, who had never been told of the wide gulf that separated the members of the different classes.
“That’s just what’s the matter with them,” answered Jones. “A good many of them are officers, and the others belong to the first class. You must be careful to say ‘sir’ when you have occasion to speak to them.”
“Say ‘sir’ to those little brats of boys!” exclaimed Dale, who was greatly amazed.
“That’s the law.”
“I don’t care if it is; I won’t do it. I am just as good as they ever dare be.”
“No body disputes that,” said Enoch. “Jones is only trying to post you so that you can keep out of trouble. You must not only address them as he says, but you must not address them at all unless they first speak to you. Of course if you want any information, you are at perfect liberty to go to your company officers to get it; the rule does not apply in that case.”
“Well, I’ll be shot if that don’t beat any thing I ever heard of,” said Morris. “Suppose we should quietly ignore all such senseless rules—what then?”
“If you have any idea of doing that, you had better make an excuse to get away from here before you put on the uniform,” replied Enoch, with a laugh that spoke volumes. “They will haze you till you can’t sleep o’ nights.”
“How will they do it?”
“O, there are plenty of ways. They are never at a loss for something, and they have the faculty of doing the very thing you would rather they would not do. If they find that any particular way of hazing bothers you more than another, they will use it every chance they get.”
“The meanest of all the mean ways of hazing is the second exercise in ‘setting up,’” observed Jones. “My back aches yet whenever I think of it. You see,” he added, addressing himself to Dale, “when I first came here I kicked against the rules, just as you show a disposition to do. I couldn’t see why a boy who wore two blue stripes around his arm should be so high up in the world that I couldn’t speak to him if I wanted to, and one day I addressed a friendly remark to one of the corporals. Great Caesar! I thought he would take my head off, he snapped me up so spitefully. After he quit jawing me I thought he had got through, but he hadn’t—not by a long shot. A few days after that, he drilled a squad of us in ‘setting up,’ and I went through the exercise a hundred and eighty times before that little fice of a corporal gave the command ‘three.’”
“It means ‘stop,’” replied Lester, who had also had some very disagreeable experience with a corporal to whom, he was determined, he would not show a proper amount of respect. “It is the same as ‘rest,’ after a squad or company stacks arms.”
“What sort of a drill is it, any way?” asked Barry. “Is it so very hard on a fellow?”
“You do it a hundred and eighty times without stopping, and then you can answer the question for yourself,” was Enoch’s response. “I can give it to you in the language of the tactics. The commands are: ‘Second, Exercise. Raise the arms from the sides, extended to their full length, till the hands meet above the head, palms of the hands to the front, fingers pointing upward, thumbs locked, right thumb in front, the shoulders pressed back. (Two.) Bend over till the hands, if possible, touch the ground, keeping the arms and knees straight. (Three.) Resume the position of a soldier.’ Try it a few times after you have taken your overcoat off, and see how funny it is.”
Jones and Lester Brigham both gave it as their private opinion that Barry would learn to his entire satisfaction that there was nothing “funny” in it.