Under Fire | Page 9

added, "but he is farder
as Chick-ago. He is a soldier, out by Fort Larmie."
"Yes?" said Davies, smiling. "Then perhaps I'll see him some day. I
expect to be out there before long."
"And you are a soldier, too! Ach Gott! ein offizier?" she exclaimed, in
consternation, born of German associations.
"Not yet, though I suppose I shall be very soon. What is your boy's
regiment?"
And, jabbering excitedly now, both at once, the two old people began
pouring their tale into his ears; told their boy's name,--"He was a
gorboral alretty,"--and they were justly proud, and Davies made them
happy by noting the name and company in his book and giving his own,
though he explained that he was not yet a lieutenant, only a
just-graduated cadet, but that if ever he found the corporal, he said, he
should tell him of his pleasant meeting with the old folks, and then,
after a cup of coffee at the restaurant counter, he returned to his own

thoughts and the car.
Soon they were spinning up along the shining Mohawk, and still his
eyelids would not close. In his waistcoat-pocket lay a bulky letter, the
last of many in the same superscription--a prim, unformed,
school-girlish hand--that had come to him during the last two years of
his cadet life. Its predecessors, carefully wrapped and tied, were in the
old trunk somewhere ahead among the baggage. In his hand again was
the telegram that, reaching him at the moment when he was bidding
adieu to the academic shades he had grown so deeply to love, had
determined him in the already half-formed resolution to cut loose from
his comrades and the class festivities in New York and take the first
train for the far West.
"URBANA, June 12.
"Doctor says come quick. Almira worse.
"B."
"B" was Almira's elder sister. Urbana, the home of his boy- and her
girlhood, the home where his father lived and died, pastor of the village
flock, a man whose devotion and patriotism during the great war had
won for himself the friendship of the leaders of the armies of the West
and for his only son, years afterwards, the prize of a cadetship at West
Point. Deeply religious in every fibre of his soul, the chaplain had
labored among the hospitals in the field from first to last, and died not
long after the close of the historic struggle, a martyr to the cause. He
died poor, too, as such men ever die, laying up no treasures upon earth,
where moth and rust and thieves are said to lessen treasure there
accumulated, yet where its accumulation seems the chief end of man
not spiritually constituted as was Davies, who was imposed upon by
every beat and beggar, tramp and drab, within reachable distance of
Urbana. Far and wide had spread abroad the words of his personal
creed,--that he would rather it were recorded against him that he had
been duped a million times than that one human being had left his door
hungering. His widow was not only merely penniless, she was helpless
but for the strong arms of her son, who slaved for her as the father had

slaved for the Union. Those were the days when pensions were few. It
was too soon after the war, and facts were fresher in men's minds.
Percy did all the farm-work by day and taught school by night until, in
his twenty-first year, he was sent to the Military Academy by the
President himself, who had known his father from the days of Donelson.
It was told of the tall, taciturn young man that he seriously
contemplated resigning during his fourth class year when he found that
he could not send home the little savings from his cadet pay. If the rule
of the sacred commandment could but be made to work both ways, and
days would be indeed long in the land the Lord our God had given to
him who most honored his father and mother, no life insurance
company in all America would have hesitated in Percy Davies's case,
had the policy been millions and the premium unity. A gentle woman
was Mrs. Davies, but a distressingly helpless and dependent one, and it
was an old saying in Urbana that Davies had married poor Salome
Percy because if he didn't nobody would; not because he stood in need
of her, but because she was much in need of him. And when, not long
after his father's death, Percy appealed to a well-to-do citizen on the
widow's behalf, he was refused, and the brawny son and heir of the
well-to-do citizen told of the incident, and was idiot enough in Percy's
presence to repeat this old village saw as the reason of the refusal, it
nearly