Trooper Tales — page 78: what you’re looking at

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

70 _ The Wooing of Benito. Silk Redmond needed to be polished off with that sort of jagged pumice which a man gets only by brushing about city streets—and in Uncle Sam’s service. As the tall trooper sat on the porch of the old banana- house, with his toughened cavalry legs hanging over, he mused savagely on the days when he had a grudge against himself—those days when he tried to work off patriotic chills and fever, and be a civilian still. Turning his back upon college days and a pretty girl, Redmond plunged southward to join his regiment; and not until he sat on the dirty deck of a transport, smoking a very black pipe, and watching the officers up on the spotless bridge, where he dare set foot only at the price of his liberty, did Silk Redmond get time to think. And at night, away up north, a little college girl had com- pleted her studies for the day, and was thinking of a big, noble soldier fellow; and often her eyelids were moist ere her student lamp flickered and sputtered out. But she did not write because she had a mind of her own, this lit- tle college girl, and she had told a certain big fellow that he was many kinds of a chump to chase away from his prospects, and everybody who liked him, when there was no show of his ever getting shot at, anyway. * ok ** * x * k * Mail had come in from the States that day, but there was no letter from the little college town. It was even- ing now. A disgusted cavalryman swung down from the porch of the old banana-house, answered retreat in a surly tone, and then strolled up the rocky trail toward a Eomichbooks (S@)