"But--but what about the company?" he faltered, feeling the world wobble and reel.
"Company the devil, sir! Amos and I don"t believe the Department intends sending us the stuff! No, sir, they"ve doubtless settled on this other scheme."
Only for a moment did Job hesitate, and then he arose supreme. His face was white, his eyes blazed as fire, his voice became pinched and high with emotion. Never, he declared, would he turn back from the duty toward which he had set his will! That duty was to his comrades in Hillsdale, who had paid him the high compliment of dedicating their lives to his leadership. Desert them now, when the first opportunity came for personal advancement, and he would be a traitor to all mankind!
If, merely for the love of fighting, he could so far forget these confiding fellows, how could he ever look them in the eyes again!
The truth of the matter was that Jeb worked himself into a frenzy of oratory which convinced in spite of logic. He was pleading desperately for Jeb, for Jeb"s hide, for Jeb"s life. Having no suspicion of this the two old gentlemen listened with rapture expressed in their moistening eyes, and when he concluded, out of breath but defiant, they sprang up and embraced him.
"By gad, sir," the Colonel cried, "you made the shades of eloquence, from Webster to Demosthenes, sit up and c.o.c.k their ears! Amos, when this war"s over we"ll run him for the senate, eh?"
So the Officers" Reserve Corps was laid upon the shelf. Other men in Hillsdale applied for it; some were ordered to report at the training camp of their divisional area; but, for Jeb, the dark angel of torture had again pa.s.sed by.
At breakfast one morning, opening the _Eagle_, his blood congealed into fine particles of ice. His head whirled, his body became sick in every part. Leaving abruptly he went into the garden and there read, painfully read, the big headlines and their accompanying story.
The draft! Drafting between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one--and he was twenty-six! He could not have been more in the center, in the very bull"s-eye, of the age selection! With all his senses in a panic, his mind darted this way and that, seeking, as a trapped rat, some avenue of exit; but on every side, so far as years counted, he was equally hemmed in. A moment of fury took the place of fear, wherein he cursed and raved against a government, calling itself paternal, that would play fast and loose with its people"s lives; but at last he fell into a dull brooding, tinged with physical and mental nausea.
He was aroused by a voice, and looked up to behold the Colonel"s head and shoulders above the picket fence. The old gentleman"s face was grave and his well-known Stetson had been pulled lower to his eyes.
"I thought I"d find you," he was saying. "Walk down to my office with me."
Since the sixth of April, now almost two months pa.s.sed, the Colonel had referred to the table in Mr. Strong"s editorial sanctum as his office; not alone because it pleased him so to do, but equally because his friend would tolerate no other arrangement. Never having possessed an office of any kind, he felt that it added dignity to his declining years; and there, each morning, he would re-check the names on his recruiting ledger, besides writing suggestions--some very good suggestions--to the War Department. If the young Martian clerks, working like bees in that august building at Sixteenth and Pennsylvania Avenue, grew into the habit of unopening fat envelopes postmarked "Hillsdale"
until the very last moment, they learned to do so after a manner of self-protection--but had the Colonel suspected this he would have gone forthwith and flourished his cane, not only over their heads, but over the heads of their heads, even unto the Mr. Secretary of War himself.
"I"m unhappy about you, Jeb," he said, as they fell into stride.
Jeb, having reached a state of mind wherein he expected at any moment to be called a coward, felt his body stiffen as if to receive a blow. He had become ashamed even to inquire for news of Marian, during these last few days, as the contrast of their characters was a thing he preferred keeping in the background. He now looked stolidly at the pavement, and asked:
"What about?"--but the words were huskily inarticulate and he repeated them, this time in a louder voice: "What about?"
"Oh, everything," the old gentleman answered. "Your splendid loyalty to the company that won"t be formed has robbed you of a place in other branches of the service which by this time would have meant much to you, and I"m afraid now it"s too late to recover the lost ground." He failed to notice that his young friend drew a breath of relief, or that he stepped out with greater confidence. "You might be training this minute, Jeb, were it not for my vain desire to put you quickly in a place of command! I am greatly distressed--greatly to be blamed!"
"Please don"t say that, sir," Jeb turned to him quickly, yet with more pleasure than solicitude in his voice. "There"ll be a second camp, and I won"t lose anything in the long run. Even if I never get to go at all, Colonel, I"ve the satisfaction of having tried--that is, I _will_ have tried; which, along with your kindness, is more than a compensation."
He meant this. He saw an opportunity, moreover, to beat the draft by giving out ahead of time his determination to attend the second training camp. It had not before occurred to him, because he had been too mentally paralyzed to think clearly. Now a suspicion which once had flickered in his mind came back with renewed vigor: that a kind of Fate was watching his career. It had steered him safely past the home company, and later had steered through rapids that might easily have dashed him against the first training camp. At present it was pointing to a secret pa.s.sage of escape from conscription. To-day, he figured rapidly, was the thirty-first of May; the second camp would not open until August the twenty-seventh. Oh, lots of things could happen in three months! Jeb had not felt quite so hopeful since the declaration of war, and launched a flow of pyrotechnical sentiments which warmed the Colonel"s blood.
This wordy recklessness continued while they turned into the _Eagle_ building and ascended to the "office." Mr. Strong looked up smilingly as they entered, and the Colonel, standing with legs apart, pushed back his hat, exclaiming:
"Amos, Jeb has in him, I declare, sir, the spirit of the old days! He"ll make a record, sir, of which we"ll be proud; and also make those wretched Huns take water or I don"t know a soldier! Rather than feel depressed because our planning has thus far kept him away from the Colors, he"s confidently and happily looking forward to the second training camp for officers, sir. Incidentally this will spare him the odium--the odium, sir--of being drafted like a common slacker!"
"I"d die if I were drafted," Jeb put in. "I don"t see how drafted men can face their own kind, much less the enemy!"
"You"re right," the Colonel thundered. "Such a system saps our manhood!
I thank G.o.d, Amos, that in the old days men responded to the call without being driven like a herd of moral lepers!"
"Not so fast, not so fast," Mr. Strong began to laugh at them. "In the old days, Roger, we owed our successes at arms to luck, rather than to a finely organized army. Washington couldn"t have whipped the British without France; we couldn"t have held our own with them again in 1812 if they hadn"t been up to their ears in the Peninsular War, and unable to send anything like an equal force over here to engage us. It"s the truth, Roger, and we lose nothing by admitting it! The Mexican War was a vastly superior power against a little one, and the same condition prevailed when we tackled Spain. Only once in our history did we find it necessary to draft, and that was when we fought an antagonist--I will not say an enemy--in every way our equal; that, Roger," he laid his hand on the Colonel"s arm and spoke tenderly, "was when we fought you."
The Colonel looked out of the window. His eyes blinked several times before he replied, in the same gentle voice:
"By gad, Amos, you did have to draft then, didn"t you!"
"We did, and I"m frank to say we should have done so in every war before and after. It"s the only fair way, and the only efficient way! But aside from what we should have done, today we"re fighting neither Mexico nor Spain. We"re fighting a blood-glutted monster whose breath is poisonous gas, whose touch is fever, whose thoughts are leprous. This is too serious an emergency to trust in the hands of a fallacious volunteer system! The Government, by which I mean ourselves, must look to its knitting with an alertness never before found necessary, or this time we perish. And I want to tell you, Roger, with all solemnity, that there may be a score of legitimate reasons why a young man should not volunteer, but none to caste dishonor on his endraftment. This nation merely says to its young fighting men, "Step up, my sons!"--then, all who should fight, will; and those who should not, won"t! There is no way more fair; there is no way more honorable! So do not re-utter your sentiments, either of you!"
"I expect you"re right," the Colonel murmured.
"I know I am. And you"ll realize it next Tuesday, Roger, when you see what fine types of young fellows come before you to be registered. I put you down as a registrar," he added, "because I am to be one, also."
"Thank goodness I won"t have to register," Jeb said contentedly. "I"m going to the second camp."
"You"ll have to register, all the same, Jeb," the editor turned to him.
"All men in the age must do that."
"But how about the second camp?"
"There"s some talk of taking no men in the second camp who are in the draft age. Youngsters like you are wanted for the rank and file."
Mr. Strong turned to his desk and began opening mail, else he might have read Jeb"s secret at a glance. The Colonel, blissfully ignorant, leaned over the ledger and began for the hundredth time to check off the extinct roster, saying with resignation:
"That sounds reasonable, Amos; and, since there"s no odium attached to a drafted man, it may be all the greater achievement in the long run when Jeb has worked himself up from the ranks. He"ll be a better officer for it."
"When is this registration?" Jeb tried to make his voice sound natural.
"Next Tuesday," Mr. Strong answered over his shoulder. The Colonel was still preoccupied and did not look up. The next moment Jeb slipped out and turned, dizzily, into Main street.
CHAPTER VI
For the remainder of that week Jeb was an ill man. He could neither eat nor sleep, but paced restlessly about the garden, sometimes going far into the country and coming home exhausted. He did not realize that his panic-stricken mind was showing signs of its agony, or that his aunts were becoming greatly alarmed. But Sunday morning Miss Sallie and Miss Veemie held a consultation and decided to call Doctor Purdy--a gruff, good-natured friend of the family, who not infrequently dropped in for a cup of tea. This time he found his patient in the garden and was soon walking arm in arm with him. Later he rejoined the ladies on the front porch.
"Is it serious?" they asked, in a breath.
"Um," he answered, pursing his lips and looking out across the lawn, "no."
They did not suspect that Doctor Purdy was utterly in the dark about Jeb"s ailment; nor that in a general way he had diagnosed it to be love or debt, judging solely from a very evident depression. Neither did the man of medicine guess how dangerously ill in mind his patient had become; for Jeb, in the darkest hours of these days, during which he was imminently faced with conscription--meaning to him a h.e.l.l of h.e.l.ls in a foreign battlefield--had so worked himself into an hysteria that personal injury seemed the easiest and only solution to his suffering.
Were he to shoot off his finger, for instance, he would not be drafted!
He had read of this being done in other countries! Or, he might point the rifle at his foot--but that, perhaps, would be a needless sacrifice.
He had thought it carefully out, and had been actually on the point of deciding when the old physician appeared. Then Doctor Purdy, reading in his eyes the very image of despair, left good suggestions as the best medicine he then knew to bolster him up. The consequence was that Jeb, instead of resorting to wounds, settled on a better plan: he would become more ill, grow worse and worse, so that by Tuesday the doctor might carry a certificate to the registration place exempting him from service. He brightened wonderfully after this; he really became a hopeful looking invalid for one who intended to flirt shamelessly with death. He almost laughed. His appet.i.te returned, and it was a hard knock for him to take to his bed instead of sitting down at the sumptuous feast which he knew Miss Sallie and Miss Veemie had provided. But bed it must be, and no dinner.
News of his illness had got abroad somewhat, and during the afternoon the Colonel and Mr. Strong called. When Miss Veemie, out of breath, came up to tell him this he expressed a feeble wish to see them, arranging himself deeper in the pillows and trying to remain calm.
"Well, sir," said the Colonel jovially, "this is no place for a soldier!
The time will come, doubtless, when we"ll be dropping by to see you tucked in white sheets, but then you"ll have a leg off, or half your head! You"ll be a battle-scarred veteran, then!"
The light was not strong enough for any of them to have seen the effect of this encouraging speech, but Jeb acquiesced feebly, adding a weak desire that the prophecy might come true. This sentiment, just at this time, did not escape the Colonel, who looked for the merest instant startled--then put an unworthy thought aside as the invalid concluded: