Trooper Tales — page 77: what you’re looking at

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

THE WOOING OF BENITO. Silk Redmond, cavalryman through necessity, and pri- ~ vate of course, sat on the porch of an old banana-house, high up in the interior of Porto Rico. For a trooper, he sadly exerted his brain. It was very foolish for a man in Redmond’s position to think at all. It seemed ages to him since patriotic proclivities went quivering through the land and the bodies and souls of callow young men. Then, for the first time in Redmond’s life, he had been close enough to the world to discover how threadbare it was worn in some places. Redmond had just emerged from college. There was a classical unsophistication about him: The youngster who blackened his boots might have given him all kinds of points concerning mundane matters—then. Redmond could have composed an astronomical essay with ease and effect, but he couldn’t dash off a murder yarn and make an edition for anything short of a weekly paper. Theoretically, he would have made a fast lawyer, but in practice it would have meant incarceration for a poor devil, whose jag had been officially spoiled, to trust to his pleading in police court. (E©) Comichbooks