The Jimmyjohn Boss, and Other Stories by Owen Wister (the best novels to read TXT) 📗

“Frank, stuff!”

“Hush, my love. Therefore York must be spared the insult of twenty more dollars a month, our statesmen must be re-elected, and you and I, Catherine, being cookless, must join the general mess.”

Thus did all separate housekeeping end, and the garrison began unitedly to eat three times a day what a Chinaman set before them, when the long-expected Albumblatt stepped into their midst, just in time for supper.

This youth was spic-and-span from the Military Academy, with a top-dressing of three months' thoughtful travel in Germany. “I was deeply impressed with the modernity of their scientific attitude,” he pleasantly remarked to the commanding officer. For Captain Duane, silent usually, talked at this first meal to make the boy welcome in this forlorn two-company post.

“We're cut off from all that sort of thing here,” said he. “I've not been east of the Missouri since '69. But we've got the railroad across, and we've killed some Indians, and we've had some fun, and we're glad we're alive—eh, Mrs. Starr?”

“I should think so,” said the lady.

“Especially now we've got a bachelor at the post!” said Mrs. Bainbridge. “That has been the one drawback, Mr. Albumblatt.”

“I thank you for the compliment,” said Augustus, bending solemnly from his hips; and Mrs. Starr looked at him and then at Mrs. Bainbridge.

“We're not over-gay, I fear,” the Captain continued; “but the flat's full of antelope, and there's good shooting up both canyons.”

“Have you followed the recent target experiments at Metz?” inquired the traveller. “I refer to the flattened trajectory and the obus controversy.”

“We have not heard the reports,” answered the commandant, with becoming gravity. “But we own a mountain howitzer.”

“The modernity of German ordnance—” began Augustus.

“Do you dance, Mr. Albumblatt?” asked Mrs. Starr.

“For we'll have a hop and all be your partners,” Mrs. Bainbridge exclaimed.

“I will be pleased to accommodate you, ladies.”

“It's anything for variety's sake with us, you see,” said Mrs. Starr, smoothly smiling; and once again Augustus bent blandly from his hips.

But the commanding officer wished leniency. “You see us all,” he hastened to say. “Commissioned officers and dancing-men. Pretty shabby—”

“Oh, Captain!” said a lady.

“And pretty old.”

“Captain!” said another lady.

“But alive and kicking. Captain Starr, Mr. Bainbridge, the Doctor and me. We are seven.”

Augustus looked accurately about him. “Do I understand seven, Captain?”

“We are seven,” the senior officer repeated.

Again Mr. Albumblatt counted heads. “I imagine you include the ladies, Captain? Ha! ha!”

“Seven commissioned males, sir. Our Major is on sick-leave, and two of our Lieutenants are related to the President's wife. She can't bear them to be exposed. None of us in the church-yard lie—but we are seven.”

“Ha! ha, Captain! That's an elegant double entendre on Wordsworth's poem and the War Department. Only, if I may correct your addition—ha! ha!—our total, including myself, is eight.” And Augustus grew as hilarious as a wooden nutmeg.

The commanding officer rolled an intimate eye at his wife.

The lady was sitting big with rage, but her words were cordial still: “Indeed, Mr. Albumblatt, the way officers who have influence in Washington shirk duty here and get details East is something I can't laugh about. At one time the Captain was his own adjutant and quartermaster. There are more officers at this table to-night than I've seen in three years. So we are doubly glad to welcome you at Fort Brown.”

“I am fortunate to be on duty where my services are so required, though I could object to calling it Fort Brown.” And Augustus exhaled a new smile.

“Prefer Smith?” said Captain Starr.

“You misunderstand me. When we say Fort Brown. Fort Russell, Fort Et Cetera, we are inexact. They are not fortified.”

“Cantonment Et Cetera would be a trifle lengthy, wouldn't it?” put in the Doctor, his endurance on the wane.

“Perhaps; but technically descriptive of our Western posts. The Germans criticise these military laxities.”

Captain Duane now ceased talking, but urbanely listened; and from time to time his eye would scan Augustus, and then a certain sublimated laugh, to his wife well known; would seize him for a single voiceless spasm, and pass. The experienced Albumblatt meanwhile continued, “By-the-way, Doctor, you know the Charite, of course?”

Doctor Guild had visited that great hospital, but being now a goaded man he stuck his nose in his plate, and said, unwisely: “Sharrity? What's that?” For then Augustus told him what and where it was, and that Krankenhaus is German for hospital, and that he had been deeply impressed with the modernity of the ventilation. “Thirty-five cubic metres to a bed in new wards,” he stated. “How many do you allow, Doctor?”

“None,” answered the surgeon.

“Do I understand none, Doctor?”

“You do, sir. My patients breathe in cubic feet, and swallow their doses in grains, and have their inflation measured in inches.”

“Now there again!” exclaimed Augustus, cheerily. “More antiquity to be swept away! And people say we young officers have no work cut out for us!”

“Patients don't die then under the metric system?” said the Doctor.

“No wonder Europe's overcrowded,” said Starr.

But the student's mind inhabited heights above such trifling. “Death,” he said, “occurs in ratios not differentiated from our statistics.” And he told them much more while they booked at him over their plates. He managed to say 'modernity' and 'differentiate' again, for he came from our middle West, where they encounter education too suddenly, and it would take three generations of him to speak clean English. But with all his polysyllabic wallowing, he showed himself keen-minded, pat with authorities, a spruce young graduate among these dingy Rocky Mountain campaigners. They had fought and thirsted and frozen; the books that he knew were not written when they went to school; and so far as war is to be mastered on paper, his equipment was full and polished while theirs was meagre and rusty.

And yet, if you know things that other and older men do not, it is as well not to mention them too hastily. These soldiers wished that they could have been taught what he knew; but they watched young Augustus unfolding himself with a gaze that might have seemed chill to a less highly abstract thinker. He, however, rose from the table pleasantly edified by himself, and hopeful for them. And as he left them, “Good-night, ladies and gentlemen,” he said; “we shall meet again.”