A War-Time Wooing | Page 5

hear your brutal swearing, sir, loud over the prayers the chaplain was saying for the dead. Have you no sense of decency at all?"
"How'n hell did I know there was any prayin' going on?" muttered Rix, bending his scowling brows down over his shoe and tugging savagely at the string.
"What was that remark, Rix?" asks the lieutenant, his grasp tightening on the stick.
No answer.
"Rix, drop that shoestring; stand attention, and look at me," says the officer, very quietly, but with setting teeth that no man fails to note. Rix slowly and sullenly obeys.
"What was the remark you made just now?" is again the question.
"I said I didn't know they were praying," growls Rix, finding he has to face the music.
"That sounds very little like your words, but--let it go. You knew very well that men were dying here right within earshot when you were making the air blue with blasphemy, and when better men were reverently silent. It is the third time you have been reprimanded in a week. I shall see to it that you are sent back to your company forthwith."
"Not while Lieutenant Hollins is quartermaster you won't," is the insubordinate reply, and even the teamsters look scared as they glance from the scowling, hanging face of Rix to the clear-cut features of the officer, and mark the change that sweeps over the latter. His eyes seem to flash fire, and his pallid face--thin with suffering and loss of blood--flushes despite his physical weakness. His handsome mouth sets like a steel-trap.
"Sergeant, get two of your men and put that fellow under guard," he orders. "Stay where you are, Rix, until they come for you." His voice is low and stern; he does not condescend to raise it for such occasion, though there is a something about it that tells the soldier-ear it can ring with command where ring is needed.
"I'd like to know what I've done," mutters Rix, angrily kicking at the pebbles at his feet.
No answer. The lieutenant has walked back a pace and has seated himself on a little bench. Another officer--a gray-haired and distinguished-looking man, with silver eagles on his shoulders--is rapidly nearing him and reaches the bank just in time to catch the next words. He could have heard them farther back, for Rix is in a fury now, and shouts aloud:
"If you knew your own interests--knew half that I know about your affairs, Lieutenant Abbot--you'd think twice before you ordered me under arrest."
The lieutenant half starts from the bench; but his self-control is strong.
"You are simply adding to your insubordination, sir," he says, coldly. "Take your prisoner, sergeant. You men are all witnesses to this language."
And muttering much to himself, Teamster Rix is marched slowly away, leaving an audience somewhat mystified. The colonel stands looking after him with a puzzled and astonished face; the men begin slowly to edge away, and then Mr. Abbot wearily rises and--again he flushes red when he finds his superior officer facing him at not three paces distance.
"What on earth does that mean, Abbot?" asks the colonel. "Who is that man?"
"One of the regimental teamsters, sir. He came here with the wounded, and there appears to have been no opportunity of sending him back now that the regiment is over in the Shenandoah. At all events, he has been allowed to loaf around here for some time, and you probably heard him swearing."
"I did; that's what brought me out of the house. But what does he mean by threatening you?"
"I have no idea, sir; or, rather, I have an idea, but the matter is of no consequence whatever, and only characteristic of the man. He is a scoundrel, I suspect, and I wonder that Hollins has kept him so long."
"Do you know that Hollins hasn't turned up yet?"
"So I heard this morning, colonel, and yet you saw him the night of the battle, did you not?"
"Not the night after, but the night before. We left him with the wagons when we marched to the ford. I was knocked off my horse about one in the afternoon, just north of the cornfield, and they got me back to the wagons with this left shoulder all out of shape--collar-bone broken; and he wasn't there then, and hadn't been seen since daybreak. Somebody said he was so cut up when you were hit at the Gap. I didn't know you were such friends."
"Well, we've known each other a long time--were together at Harvard and moved in the same set; but there was never any intimacy, colonel."
"I see, I see," says the older officer, reflectively. "He was a stranger to me when I joined the regiment and found him quartermaster. He was Colonel Raymond's choice, and you know that in succeeding to his place I preferred to make no changes. But I