The Last Shot Part 8

"Will it be ten years before we meet again?" he asked.

"Perhaps, unless you change the rules about officers dossing the frontier to take tea," she replied.

"Even if I did, the vice-chief of staff might hardly go."

"Then perhaps you must wait," she warned him, "until the teachers of peace have done away with all frontiers."

"Or, if there were war, I should come!" he answered in kind. He half wished that this might start another argument and she would miss her train. But she made no reply. "And you may come to the Gray capital again. You are not through travelling!" he added.

This aroused her afresh; the flame was back in her eyes.

"Yes. I have all the memories of my journeys to enjoy, all their lessons to study," she said. "There is the big world, and you want to have had the breath of all its climates in your lungs, the visions of all its peoples yours. Then the other thing is three acres and a cow. If you could only have the solidarity of the j.a.panese, their public spirit, with the old Chinese love of family and peace, and a cathedral near-by on a hill! Patriotism? Why, it is in the soil of your three acres. I love to feel the warm, rich earth of our own garden in my hands!

Hereafter I shall be a stay-at-home; and if my children win," she held out her hand in parting with the same frank, earnest grip of her greeting, "why, you will find that tea is, as usual, at four-thirty."

He had found the women of his high official world--a narrower world than he realized--much alike. Striking certain keys, certain chords responded. He could probe the depths of their minds, he thought, in a single evening. Then he pa.s.sed on, unless it was in the interest of pleasure or of his career to linger. This meeting had left his curiosity baffled. He understood how Marta's vitality demanded action, which exerted itself in a feminine way for a feminine cause. The cure for such a fad was most clear to his masculine-perception. What if all the power she had shown in her appeal for peace could be made to serve another ambition? He knew that he was a great man. More than once he had wondered what would happen if he were to meet a great woman. And he should not see Marta Galland again unless war came.

VII

TIMES HAVE CHANGED

A prodigious brown worm, its body turning and rising and falling with the grade and throbbing with the march of its centipede feet, wound its way along a rising mountain road. In the strong, youthful figures set in the universal type of military mould it might have been a regiment of any one of many nations' but the tint of its uniform was the brown of the nine hundred regiments that prepared for war against the gray of the fifteen hundred under Hedworth Westerling.

The 53d of the Browns had started for La Tir on the same day that the 128th of the Grays had started for South La Tir. While the 128th was going to new scenes, the 53d was returning to familiar ground. It had detrained in the capital of the province from which its ranks had been recruited. After a steep incline, there was a welcome bugle note and with shouts of delight the centipede's legs broke apart! Bankers', laborers', doctors', valets', butchers', manufacturers', and judges'

sons threw themselves down on the greensward of the embankment to rest.

With their talk of home, of relatives whom they had met at the station, and of the changes in the town was mingled talk of the crisis.

Meanwhile, an aged man was approaching. At times he would break into a kind of trot that ended, after a few steps, in shortness of breath. He was quite withered, his bright eyes twinkling out of an area of moth patches, and he wore a frayed uniform coat with a medal on the breast.

"Is this the 53d?" he quavered to the nearest soldier

"It certainly is!" some one answered. "Come and join us, veteran!"

"Is Tom--Tom Fragini here?"

The answer came from a big soldier, who sprang to his feet and leaped toward the old man.

"It's grandfather, as I live!" he called out, kissing the veteran on both cheeks. "I saw sister in town, and she said you'd be at the gate as we marched by."

"Didn't wait at no gate! Marched right up to you!" said grandfather.

"Marched up with my uniform and medal on! Stand off there, Tom, so I can see you. My word! You're bigger'n your father, but not bigger'n I was!

No, sir, not bigger'n I was in my day before that wound sort o' bent me over. They say it's the lead in the blood. I've still got the bullet!"

The old man's trousers were threadbare but well darned, and the holes in the uppers of his shoes were carefully patched. He had a merry air of optimism, which his grandson had inherited.

"Well, Tom, how much longer you got to serve?" asked grandfather.

"Six months," answered Tom.

"One, two, three, four--" grandfather counted the numbers off on his fingers. "That's good. You'll be in time for the spring ploughing. My, how you have filled out! But, somehow, I can't get used to this kind of uniform. Why, I don't see how a girl'd be attracted to you fellows, at all!"

"They have to, for we're the only kind of soldiers there are nowadays.

Not as gay as in your day, that's sure, when you were in the Hussars, eh?"

"Yes, I was in the Hussars--in the Hussars! I tell you, with our sabres a-gleaming, our horses' bits a-jingling, our pennons a-flying, and all the color of our uniform--I tell you, the girls used to open their eyes at us. And we went into the charge like that--yes, sir, just that gay and grand, Colonel Galland leading!"

Military history said that it had been a rather foolish charge, a fine example of the vainglory of unreasoning bravery that accomplishes nothing, but no one would suggest such scepticism of an immortal event in popular imagination in hearing of the old man as he lived over that intoxicated rush of horses and men into a battery of the Grays.

"Well, didn't you find what I said was true about the lowlanders?" asked grandfather after he had finished the charge, referring to the people of the southern frontier of the Browns, where the 53d had just been garrisoned.

"No, I kind of liked them. I made a lot of friends," admitted Tom.

"They're very progressive."

"Eh? eh? You're joking!" To like the people of the southern frontier was only less conceivable than liking the people of the Grays. "That's because you didn't see deep under them. They're all on the outside--a flighty lot! Why, if they'd done their part in that last war we'd have licked the Grays until they cried for mercy! If their army corps had stood its ground at Volmer--"

"So you've always said," interrupted Tom.

"And the way they cook tripe! I couldn't stomach it, could you? And if there's anything I am partial to it's a good dish of tripe! And their light beer--like drinking froth! And their bread--why, it ain't bread!

It's chips! 'Taint fit for civilized folks!"

"But I sort of got used to their ways," said Tom.

"Eh? eh?" Grandfather looked at grandson quizzically, seeking the cause of such heterodoxy in a northern man. "Say, you ain't been falling in love?" he hazarded. "You--you ain't going to bring one of them southern girls home?"

"No!" said Tom laughing.

"Well, I'm glad you ain't, for they're naturally light-minded. I remember 'em well." He wandered on with his questions and comments. "Is it a fact, Tom, or was you just joking when you wrote home that the soldiers took so many baths?"

"Yes, they do."

"Well, that beats me! It's a wonder you didn't all die of pneumonia!" He paused to absorb the phenomenon. Then his half-childish mind, prompted by a random recollection, flitted to another subject which set him to giggling. "And the little crawlers--did they bother you much, the little crawlers?"

"The little crawlers?" repeated Tom, mystified.

"Yes. Everybody used to get 'em just from living close together. Had to comb 'em out and pick 'em out of your clothes. The chase we used to call it."

"No, grandfather, crawlers have gone out of fas.h.i.+on. And no more epidemics of typhoid and dysentery either," said Tom.

"Times have certainly changed!" grumbled Grandfather Fragini.

Interested in their own reunion, they had paid no attention to a group of Tom's comrades near-by, sprawled around a newspaper containing the latest despatches from both capitals. It was a group as typical as that of the Grays around Hugo Mallin's cot; only the common voice was that of defence.

"Five million soldiers to our three million!"

"Eighty million people to our fifty million!"