Adventure, February 1917 — page 202: what you’re looking at

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

200 So it went on for three or four months, with Maitland talking considerable less and thinking considerable more and putting most of his money away in the International Bank. That’s always a bad sign. When a man figures on sticking out his hitch, he leaves his spare coin with the paymaster. He can’t get it then till he draws his finals. ~Then came doings. There was the fresh bunch of officers and the men from the States, for one thing. New men like that have got to be amalgamated, and our first drill with them was extra long and strenu- ous. It left Maitland pretty disgusted, and after we had gone back to our squad- room him and me had. our crowning argu- ment about service discipline. “Vou’re a fool if you can’t see it,” I said to him at the last. ‘It’s got to be. You can’t have order without it.” “Order!” jeered Maitland. ‘“That’s the worst yet. D’you call this place orderly, with us and the Austrians breakin’ each other’s heads every day? If it is, then south of the slot in Frisco is an angel’s dream of peace.” He had me there. The feud I spoke of in the beginning was just then at its most interesting point. The trouble had begun over one fool thing after another, like the Austrians kidnaping our dog Spike, and us retaliating by carrying off their monkey mascot, Jocko, and their crowing over us a bit too much when they won the Tartar Wall hike, and Sheehy running amuck in a soccer football game and knocking out four of them before somebody got him with a bayonet hilt. Then Trumpeter MacMaster and two other youngsters had caught the Austrian first sergeant when he was a bit illum- inated, and kept him tied up in a room in Number Three for two days, which was a their idea of a joke. The Austrians had warned us out of Korean Charley’s, and we had intimated they wouldn’t be safe in Schultz’s, and it got so none of us were safe anywhere much, outside our legation walls. There were black eyes and bruised heads to spare in each garrison, but the combats had mostly been individual-like as yet. No telling how long it would stay that way, though, for there were agitators and hot- heads in each garrison, bent on dragging the rest of us into a wholesale shindy. If they succeeded, it’d likely be a nasty fight. The Austrian uniform for liberty includes Adventure bayonets, mind you. So far they hadn’t used them, being clean enough fighters, and so we hadn’t used the baseball bats and Chinese swords and other miscellaneous weapons we'd stored up in Schultz’s to be -ready for them. But a mob’ll do what an individual won’t, and the situation had the commanding officers of both guards worry- ing some. “It’s necessary, anyway,” Maitland. “It is like blazes. What’s it all about? Just because a few fungla fools filled up with rice champagne get in a fightin’ mood, with that goat Regan to peddle rumors and stir them up——” For qnce I agreed with him. That pro- miscuous fighting is rookies’ work, anyway. “Tt meant discipline,” I corrected him. “Oh! Well, what’s it necessary for? But what’s the use arguing? Pm going to see if I’m on guard tomorrow.” says I to Sxg HE DIDN’T come back until nearly m-> timefortroop. I thought there was ~* gomething fresh on his mind, even then. Thoughtful wrinkles kept coming and going above his eyes; and now his jaw set hard, and now it relaxed worried-like. But after troop came chow, and police call, and more drill, and it was going on in the afternoon when he told me of his luck. And what he had to say sounded innocent | enough in one way and suspicious enough in another; and it was the devil and all hard for me to decide what to do about it. Maitland was on guard to-morrow, post number two, mid relief. And he was to get a hundred dollars Mex. just for extending his post a hundred yards beyond what his orders called for. T’ll have to tell you about number two post. The Tartar Wall, you know, is just back of our garrison, separated from it by a narrow alley. Jno the wall has been dug our magazine, and on top of the wall is a blockhouse. And post number two ex- tends around and around that blockhouse. as useless a post, to all appearances, as a sentry ever walked. It was Chang, number one barrack’s _coolie, the crookedest Chink that ever collected cumshaw, that had made Maitland the offer. It seemed like Chang knew that Jim Li, head-quartermaster’s coolie, was stealing stuff out of the quartermaster’s storeroom, passing it through the window S (E00) 0\(0)0) (C (S@) AA)