"Sir, I have to report that Trooper Kennedy has not been seen about the
quarters," said he.
"Then try the stables, sergeant," answered the veteran campaigner, and
thither would Schreiber next have gone, even had he not been sent. And,
sure enough, there was Kennedy, with rueful face and a maudlin romaunt
about a moonlit meeting with a swarm of painted Sioux, over which the
stable guard were making merry and stirring the trooper's soul to wrath
ungovernable.
"I can prove ut," he howled, to the accompaniment of clinching fists and
bellicose lunges at the laughing tormentors nearest him. "I can whip the
hide off'n the scut that says I didn't. Ask Lootn't Field, bejabers! He
saw it. Ask--Oh, Mother of God! what's this I'm sayin'?"--And there,
with stern, rebuking gaze, stood the man they knew and feared, every
soul of them, as they did no commissioned soldier in the ----th,
Sergeant Schreiber, the redoubtable, and Schreiber had heard the insane
and damaging boast.
"Come with me, Kennedy," was all he said, and Kennedy snatched his
battered felt headgear down over his eyes and tacked woefully after his
swift-striding master, without ever another word.
But it was to his own room Schreiber took the unhappy Irishman, not to
the quarters of Company "F.
Pages:
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64