Читать книгу Captain Jinks, Hero - Ernest Howard Crosby - Страница 12

Table of Contents

UT our relation to our environments will change, however much pleased we may be with them, and "Cap" Jinks found himself gradually growing too old for his brigade. The younger boys and their parents began to complain that he was unreasonably standing in the way of their promotion, and a fiery mustache gave signs to the world that he was now something more than a boy. Still he could not bring himself to relinquish the uniform and the white plume. A life without military trimmings was not to be thought of, and there was no militia at Homeville. Consequently he remained in the Boys' Brigade as long as he could. When at last he saw that he must resign—he was now two-and-twenty—he felt that there was only one course open to him, and that was to join the army; and he broached this plan to his parents. His mother did not like the idea of giving up her only son to such a profession, but Colonel Jinks took kindly to the suggestion. It would bring a little real militarism into the family and give a kind of ex post facto justification to his ancient title. "Sam, my boy," said he, "you're a chip of the old block. You'll keep up the family tradition and be a colonel like me. I will write to your Uncle George about it to-morrow. He'll get you an appointment to East Point without any trouble. Sam, I'm proud of you."

Uncle George Jinks, the only brother of the Colonel, was a member of Congress from a distant district, who had a good deal of influence with the Administration. The Colonel wrote to him asking for the cadetship and rehearsing at length the young captain's unusual qualifications and his military enthusiasm. A week later he received the answer. His brother informed him that the request could not have come at a more opportune moment, as he had a vacancy to fill and had been on the point of calling a public examination of young men in his district for the purpose of selecting a candidate; but in view of the evident fitness of his nephew, he would alter his plans and offer him the place without further ceremony. He wished only that Sam would do credit to the name of Jinks.

It was on a beautiful day in June that "Cap" Jinks bade farewell to Homeville. The family came out in front of the house, keeping back their tears as best they could at this the first parting; but Sam, tho he loved them well, had no room in his heart for regret. There was a vision of glory beckoning him on which obliterated all other feelings. The Boys' Brigade was drawn up at the side of the road and presented arms as he drove by, and he saw in this the promise of greater things. As he sat on the back seat of the wagon by himself behind the driver, he took from his pocket the old original "hero," the lead officer of his boyhood, and gazed at it smiling. "Now I am to be a real hero," he thought, "and all the world will repeat the name of Sam Jinks and read about his exploits." He put the toy carefully back in his breast pocket. It had become the talisman of his life and the symbol of his ambitions.

The long railway journey to East Point was full of interest to the young traveler, who had never been away from home before. His mind was full of military things, but he saw no uniforms, no arms, no fortifications anywhere. How could people live in such a careless, unnatural fashion? He blushed with shame as he thought to himself that a foreigner might apparently journey through the country from one end to the other without knowing that there was such a thing as a soldier in the land. What a travesty this was on civilization! How baseless the proud boasts of national greatness when only an insignificant and almost invisible few paid any attention to the claims of military glory! The outlook was indeed dismal, but Sam was no pessimist. Obstacles were in his dictionary "things to be removed." "I shall have a hand in changing all this," he muttered aloud. "When I come home a conquering general with the grateful country at my feet, these wretched toilers in the field and at the desk will have learned that there is a nobler activity, and uniforms will spring up like flowers before the sun." Where Sam acquired his command of the English language and his poetic sensibility it would be difficult to say. It is enough to know that these faculties endeavored, not without success, to keep pace with his growing ambition for glory.

Sam's first weeks at East Point were among the happiest in his life. Here, at any rate, military affairs were in the ascendant. His ideal of a country was simply an East Point infinitely enlarged. His neat gray uniform seemed already to transform him into a hero. When he thought of the great soldiers who had been educated at this very place, he felt a proud spirit swelling in his bosom. One night in a lonely part of the parade-ground he solemnly knelt down and kissed the sod. The military cemetery aroused his enthusiasm, and the captured cannon, the names of battles inscribed here and there on the rocks, and the portraits of generals in the mess-hall, all in turn fascinated him. As a new arrival he was treated with scant courtesy and drilled very hard, but he did not care. Tho his squad-fellows were almost overcome with fatigue, he was always sorry when the drill came to an end. He never had enough of marching and counter-marching, of shouldering and ordering arms. Even the "setting-up" exercises filled him with joy. When cavalry drills began he was still more in his element. His old teamster days now stood him in good stead. In a week he could do anything with a horse—he understood the horse, and the horse trusted him. When he first emerged from the riding-school on horseback in a squadron and took part in a drill on the great parade-ground, he was prouder than ever before. He went through it in a delirium, feeling like a composite photograph of Washington and Napoleon. When the big flag went up in the morning to the top of the towering flag-staff, Sam's spirits went up with it, and they floated there, vibrating, hovering, all day; but when the flag came down at night, Sam did not come down. He was always up, living an ecstatic dream-life in the seventh heaven.

One night as Sam lay in his tent dreaming that he had just won the battle of Waterloo, he heard a voice close to his ears.

"Jinks!"

"Yes, sir."

"Here is an order for you to report at once up in the woods at old Fort Hut. The password is 'Old Gory'; say that, and the sentinel will let you out of camp. Go along and report to the colonel at once."

"What is it?" cried Sam. "Is it an attack?"

"Very likely," said the voice. "Now wake up your snoring friend there, for he's got to go too. What's his name?"

"Cleary," answered Sam, and he proceeded gently to awaken his tent-mate and break the news to him that the enemy was advancing. It was not easy to rouse the young man, but finally they both succeeded in dressing in the dark, and hastened away between the tents across the most remote sentry beat. They were duly challenged, whispered the countersign, and in a few moments were climbing the rough and thickly wooded hill to the fort.

"I wonder who the enemy is," said Sam.

"Enemy? Nonsense," replied Cleary. "They're going to haze us."

"Haze us? Good heavens!" said Sam. He had heard of hazing before, but he had been living in such a realm of imagination for the past weeks that the gossip had never really reached his consciousness, and now that he was confronted with the reality he hardly knew how to face it.

"Yes," said Cleary, "they're going to haze us, and I wonder why I ever came to this rotten place anyhow."

"Don't, don't say that," cried Sam. "You were at Hale University for a year or two, weren't you? Did they do any hazing there?"

"Not a bit. They stopped it all long ago. The professors there say it isn't manly."

"That can't be true," said Sam, "or they wouldn't do it here. But why has it kept up here when they've stopped it at all the universities?"

"I don't know," said Cleary, "but perhaps it's wearing uniforms. I feel sort of different in a uniform from out of it, don't you?"

"Of course I do," exclaimed Sam. "I feel as if I were walking on air and rising into another plane of being."

"Well—ye-es—perhaps, but I didn't mean that exactly," answered Cleary. "But somehow I feel more like hitting a fellow over the head when I'm in uniform than when I'm not, don't you?"

"I hadn't thought of that," said Sam, "but I really think I do. Do you think they'll hit us over the head?"

"There's no telling. There's Captain Clark of the first class and Saunders of the third who are running the hazing just now, they say, and they're pretty tough chaps."

"Is that Captain Clark with the squeaky voice?" asked Sam.

"Yes, he spoiled it taking tabasco sauce when he was hazed three years ago. They say it took all the mucous membrane off his epiglottis."

There was silence for a time.

"Saunders is that fellow with the crooked nose, isn't he?" asked Sam.

"Yes; when they hazed him last year they made him stand with his nose in the crack of a door until they came back, and they forgot they had left him, and somebody shut the door on his nose by mistake. But he's an awfully plucky chap. He just went on standing there as if nothing had happened."

"Splendid, wasn't it?" cried Sam, beginning to see the heroic possibilities of hazing. "Do you suppose that they have always hazed here?"

"Yes, of course."

"And that General German and General Meriden and all the rest were hazed here just like this?"

"Yes, to be sure."

Sam felt his spirits soaring again.

"Then I wouldn't miss it for anything," said he. "It has always been done and by the greatest men, and it must be the right thing to do. Just think of it. Meriden has walked up this very hill like you and me to be hazed!" There was exultation in his tone.

"Well, I only hope Meriden looked forward to it with greater joy than I do," said Cleary, with a dry laugh. "But here we are."

Before them under the ruined walls of the old redoubt called Fort Hut, stood a small group of cadets, indistinctly lighted by several moving dark-lanterns. While they were still twenty yards away, two men sprang out from behind a tree, grasped them by the arms, tied their elbows behind them, and, leading them off through the woods for a short distance, bound them to a tree out of sight of the rest, and left them there with strict injunctions not to move. It never entered into the head of either of the prisoners that they might disobey this order, and they waited patiently for events to take their course. As far as they could make out by listening, some others of their classmates were already undergoing the ordeal of hazing. They could hear water splashing, suppressed screams and groans, and continual whispering. The light of the lanterns flickered through the trees, now and then illuminating the topmost branches. Presently a man came and sat down near them, and said:

"Don't get impatient. We're nearly ready for you." It was the voice of one of their two captors.

"May I ask you a question, sir?" said Sam.

"Blaze away," responded the man.

"Was General Gramp hazed at this same place, do you know?"

"Yes," said the man. "In this very same place. And while he was waiting he sat on that very log over there."

Sam peered with awe into the darkness.

"May I—do you think I might—just sit on it, too?" asked Sam.

"Certainly," said the cadet affably, untying the rope from the tree and leading Sam over to the log, where he tied him again.

Sam sat down reverently.

"How well preserved the log is," said Sam.

"Yes," said the guard; "of course they wouldn't let it decay. It's a sort of historical monument. They overhaul it every year. Anyway it's ironwood."

Sam thought to himself that perhaps some day the log might be noted as the spot where the great General Jinks sat while awaiting his hazing, and tears of joy rolled softly down over his freckles. He was still lost in this emotion when steps were heard approaching and the lantern-light drew nearer.

"Come, Smith, bring the prisoners in," said the same voice that had waked Sam in his tent. He looked at the speaker and recognized the tall, hatchet-faced, crook-nosed Saunders. Two or three cadets unfastened Sam and Cleary, still, however, leaving their arms bound behind them, and brought them to the open place under the wall where Sam had first seen them. Sam now saw nothing; walking in the steps of Generals Gramp and German, he felt the ecstasy of a Christian martyr. He would not have exchanged his lot with any one in the world. Cleary, however, who possessed a rather mundane spirit, took in the scene. Twenty or thirty cadets were either standing or seated on the ground round a circle which was illuminated by several dark-lanterns placed upon the ground. In the center of the circle were a tub of water, some boards and pieces of rope, and two large baskets whose contents were concealed by a cloth.

"Come, boys," squeaked Captain Clark, a short, thickset fellow who looked much older than the others and who spoke in a peculiar cracked voice. "Come, let's begin by bracing them up."

"Bracing" was a process adopted for the purpose of making the patient assume the position of a soldier, only very much exaggerated—a position which after a few minutes becomes almost intolerable. Cleary and Sam were promptly taken and tied back to back to an upright stake which had escaped their observation. They were tied at the ankle, knee, waist, under the arms, and at the chin and forehead. By tightening these ropes as desired and placing pieces of wood in between, against the back, the hazers made each victim stand with the chest pushed preternaturally forward and the chin and abdomen drawn preternaturally back. Cleary found this position irksome from the start, and soon decidedly painful, but Sam was proof against it. In fact, he had been practising just this position for eight or ten years, and it now came to him naturally. Cleary soon showed marks of discomfort. It was a warm night, and the sweat began to stand out on his forehead. As far as he was concerned the hazing was already a success, but Sam evidently needed something more.

"Here, give me the tabasco bottle," whispered Clark to Smith.

As the latter brought the article from one of the baskets, Sam said to him in a low voice,

"Did General Gramp take it out of that same bottle?"

"Yes," said Smith; "strange to say, it's the very same one, and all through his life afterward he took tabasco three times a day."

Sam rolled his eyes painfully to catch a glimpse of the historic bottle. Clark took it and applied it to Sam's lips. It was red-hot stuff, and the whole audience rose to watch its effect upon the victim at the stake. Sam swallowed it as if it had been lemonade. In fact, he was only aware of the honor that he was receiving. He had only enough earthly consciousness left to notice that one of the cadets in the crowd was photographing him with a kodak, and accordingly he did not even wink.

"By Jove, he's lined with tin," ejaculated Saunders, whose deflected nose gave him a sinister expression. "You ought to have had his plumbing, Clark."

"Shut up and mind your own business," said Clark. "Come, let's give him the tub. This won't do. That other chap's happy enough where he is."

Sam was untied again and led forward to the middle of the ring, the faithful Smith still keeping close to him.

"Is that an old tub?" whispered Sam, still standing stiffly as if his body had permanently taken the "braced" shape.

"I should say so. All the generals were ducked in it. Kneel down there and look in. Do you see that round dent in the middle? That's where General Meriden bumped his head in it. He never did things by halves."

Sam did as he was told, and he felt that he was in a proper attitude upon his knees at such a shrine. To him it was holy water.

"Now, Jinks," squeaked Clark.

"Yes, sir," answered Sam.

"Stand on your head now in that tub, and be quick about it."

Sam fixed his mind upon General Meriden in the same circumstances, drew in his breath, and endeavored to stand on his head in a foot of water, holding on to the rim of the tub with his hands. His legs waved irresolutely in the air with no apparent unity of motive, and bubbles gurgled about his neck and shoulders.

"Grab his legs!" shouted Clark.

Two cadets obeyed the order, and Clark took out his watch to time the ordeal. The instants that passed seemed like an age.

"Isn't time up?" whispered Saunders.

"Shut up, you fool, haven't I got my watch open?" replied Clark. "But, good heavens!" he added, "take him out—I believe my watch has stopped." And he shook it and put it to his ear.

Sam was hauled out and laid on the grass, but he was entirely unconscious. His tormentors were thoroughly scared. Fortunately they had all gone through a course of "first aid to the injured," and they immediately took the proper precautions, holding him up by the feet until the water ran out of his mouth and nose, and then rolling him on the tub and manipulating his arms. At last some faint indications of breathing set in, and they concluded to carry him down to his tent. Using two boards as a stretcher, six of them acted as bearers, and the procession moved toward the camp. Cleary would have been forgotten, had he not asked them to untie him, which they did, and he followed behind, walking most stiffly. As they neared the camp the party separated. Two of the strongest took Sam, whose mind was wandering, to his tent, and Clark made Cleary come and spend the night with him, lest anxiety at Sam's condition might impel him to report the matter to the authorities. How they all got to their tents in safety, and how the password happened to be known to all of them, we must leave it to the officers in command at East Point to explain. Sam was dropped upon his bunk without much consideration. The two cadets waited long enough to make sure that he was breathing, and then they decamped.

"It's really a shame," said Smith to Saunders, who tented with him, before he turned over to sleep; "it's really a shame to leave that fellow there without a doctor, but we'd all get bounced if it got out."