Argosy, Vol. 85, No. 3 — page 82: what you’re looking at

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

424 THE quiring comrades later in the evening. ‘“You’d think to see him, that he’d chucked the game for the team, instead of winning it practically single-handed. He just stands there staring out of the window, with nothing more to say than a particularly reticent clam. If he wasn’t so all-fired fit, ’'d think he was starting in on a sickness. “Why, just to show you how he’s be- having,” Darwin went on, “ he got a tele- gram from his dad to-night. Just the one word, ‘ Congratulations,’ it was; but the way he looked you’d have thought it was a death warrant. He went white when he read it, and I believed for a minute he was going to faint. Then he sort of caught himself together. ‘Oh, it’s the game, he means,’ he muttered. Yet what else could he have supposed the old man was wiring him congratulations about?” ‘““Pshaw! It’s probably only the effect of coming off training,” suggested one of the others consolingly. lows go queer before because of that, and Kerr has been sticking to it pretty close, you know. Give him a day or two, and he’ll come around all right.” But a day or two passed, and a month or two passed; and still Cadet Mosely maintained that glum and repellent atti- tude toward his world. From being per- haps the most frankly sociable and genial chap in the whole corps, he degenerated into a recluse and a “ grouch.” “He acts to me like a sort of Eugene Aram,” said one keen-witted chap in dis- cussing the change; “one of those guys, you know, that’s got a guilty secret on his mind. Half the time he goes mooning along without noticing anybody or any- thing, and then if you happen to speak to him suddenly or unexpectedly, he’ll al- most jump out of his skin.” There was the more opportunity to ob- serve and speculate upon the former favo- rite’s altered demeanor, because there was little else to occupy the attention of the cadets in their hours of leisure. It was a bitterly cold winter that year, starting in just after the Army-Navy ‘““T’ve seen fel-. ARGOSY. game—in the West Point calendar every- thing dates from that—and lasting un- broken until now late in February the river still lay sheathed in ice, the snow was piled deep across the plain, the biting winds of the Highlands whooped and whistled around corners and through sal- lyports, and the Gothic buildings showed along the spouting and eaves grotesque gargoyles and projections which the archi- tect never planned. Visitors to the post were few, and the ordinary entertainments of the season in consequence languished. It was a dull, depressing period, during which both the cadets and the officers in charge of them chafed under the monotony of their rou- tine. Various reckless outbreaks and _ esca- pades on the part of the corps were a natural result of these conditions, and proportionately there was a steady in- crease to the ranks of the “ Area Birds,” those offenders against military discipline who for their sins are compelled during recreation hours to pace the quadrangular courtyard of barracks, chins up, guns a Shoulder, and at a quick-step. Ordinarily Kerr could hardly have escaped this drag-net, and with the others would have been trudging a five-hour stretch in the bleak quadrangle on Wed- nesday and Saturday afternoons; but this year he was too absorbed and indifferent to join in any of the lawlessness. Not so, though, his room-mate. Dar- win was mixed up in nearly everything going, and although for a time he man- aged to evade the vigilance of the tacs, was finally gathered in and given a sen- tence—a circumstance which, strange as it may seem, was materially to affect the ambitious plans of Mr. Tommy Wilburt and Miss Queenie Sinclair.. Widely separate worlds West Point and Forty-Second Street may be; but just as a stone cast into a lake will cause an ever- widening ripple that spreads until it reaches the farther shore, the little inci- dent up the Hudson was not to be unfelt in the land of the bright lights. DOOK AMUC C©