Adventure, February 1917 — page 201: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

C4 Robert I. Pearsall Author of “Color Guards,” “Wrecked,” etc. HAT was a funny liberty (re- miniscenced the Old-Timer). Take it all in all, it was the craziest liberty—and it had a crazier wind-up. And it all came of my bunkie, Jack Maitland, being what you might call an intellectual gum-boot. That, and the feud with the Austrians, and it was crazy too. Sure, this was in Pekin, when I was a second hitch Marine. Well, Maitland came to us before his name was hardly dry on the muster-roll. At that, he could make most hash-marked old-timers look like rookies when it came tc drill—a soldier born he was, that way. But in his mental attitude, so to speak, he hadn’t changed a_hair’s- breadth since first he put on government breeches. You know what I mean, sub- ordination and discipline and that sort of thing. They were still all capital crimes to hin “What’s the use of it?” he’d ask me after a drill, ‘Doin’ one thing over and over again—no sense"in it! Don’t we know how to doit already? What’s the use of chasin’ us around a parade ground day in and day out to prove it? Shoulder kup! 'Tomfoolery! And I’ve got three years and a butt more of it! Wish I was in the States again. I’d sure beat it.” "2 “You’re gettin’ paid for it,” I’d remind im. “That’s a devil of an apology. I want to do something that’s some good, and I’m eternally condemned if this is. Hikin’ around and around a five-acre field! And guard duty’sthesame. So many paces this way, so many paces that, ‘keep constantly on the alert and observe everything that takes place within sight or hearin’.? What takes place? Not a darn thing. wages is there to guard? The'same.” “But it’s discipline,” says I. “Discipline’s rot, then!’ snaps Private Maitland. You see how it was. kept worrying him all the time, like corns on a hike. And I couldn’t reason him out of them because I’d never reasoned myself out; I’d just grown out of them, like every- body else—everybody but Maitland. 199 ‘ Port kup! Order hupt. Them ideas just ~ <S =) JOO (EO) i *