Barbour County index. [volume] (Medicine Lodge, Kan.) 1880-current, 1901-06-19
''PALS."
BY c. E. Weigall.

"DY THEIR fruits shall We know
d them.
Still to ourselves in every place consigned,
Our own felicity we make or find"
He lay on his bed-cot and looked at
the stars through chinl> in the roof
between window and canvas.
1t was a very hot night, of that
breathless, lurid deafness that makes
a Malta summer a WEAKNESS of the
flesh. Inside his tent Is sturdy souls
were snoring, under their brown
blankets, the sleep of the just; but
the fourteenth, Gunner Amherst, had
been awake since Lights out" and
sleep would probably not visit his eyes
at all until the little bugler sounded
reyeille from the guard-room steps at
Tigne fort.
He was thinking, and perhaps there
was some excuse for the deep concen-
tration necessary for such purpose,
for Amherst did not often indulge in
an art SO purely imaginative.
The tramp of the sentry up and
down across the square on his eternal
round, the sob of the tide under the
sheer cliff, the call of a distant siren
from ship in the grand harbor,
were the only sounds that broke the
stiffness of the night.
In the daytime Gunner Amherst had
no time for thought. Drills and
fatigues, drinks in the canteen, cricl1-
ct or football, as the season might al
low; bathing, a further pint in the
canteen with a chum, and then Last
Post" did not leave much time in
which a man might develop original
TRAITS or even habit of thought, for in
/ his set the reading-room was not the
fashion.
His face was puckered into frown
that marred the usual good temper of
its daredevil expression. He had
some thing on his mind, and that some
thing led him at last to rise from his
bed-cot, and don the few clothes neces-
sary to decency, quietly tiptoeing at
last out of the tent.
Keeping in the shadow of the
buildings, away from earshot of the
sentry, he skirted the camp till he
came out beyond the gray walls of the
fort above the sea. There he sat him
down among the short, sunburnt stub
BILE and sand, and barred his great chest
to the cool night wind of heaven that
blew from the dread Sirocco quarter.
My" he said, I'm battlin' it out,
but L don't come anigh the end of it.
If Jem takes the stripe, it's splits be-
tween him and me; there's too many
'alf quarterns-or the end on 'em-
down agen me, to see me bloomin'
Bombardier. Now, Jem'll go mashin'
about with n. c. O.'s, and mayn't look
at an old pal, and as to speaking to
me friendly like, why, it's all down
in the regulations as there's a great
gulf between them and the likes of
us, me in particular, as one as as a
many things down on my defaulter's
sheet as shouldn't be there. We've
been friends since the first day e
joined-im an me together-rookies
as didn't know gun from pea-stick.
1t was always the same afore we
joined, at 'ome in the old place. If
there was a furrow to be plowed, Jem
always took first prize, though might
run the show pretty nigh; or piece
TO be sung at the harvest-home, or a
holiday-making, when there was a
choice of anyone to go, Jem was al
ways chosen. But I was never one to
feel jealous like. Same as when e
went off with my gal, Molly Maloney-
90 could feel jealous of Jem?'
Amherst paused a moment and
gazed at the sky, crisped into points
of yellow stars. The wash of the sea
had made him melancholy, perhaps, as
he was out of sorts. That one last
glass of beer the night before in the
canteen had been too much for "Old
Devil-may-care," as his companions
called him. He leaned up against a
grey rock bowlder, and tore up tus-
sock of grass.
"a. N. C. o. mayn't speak to a or
| binary gunner when e pals with the
other lot O. sarjints and their belong
ings. Don't know as pants to do that
though! If it was me, 1 don't think as
'ow I'd ever chuck q pal-and yet
| there's a deal o. pleasure in bein'
looked up to! Not as anyone1l ever
look up to me-I'm bit of a waster.''
There was suspicious moisture in
the eyes of this "bit of waster." He
was not in the least romantic figure.
His good-looking face had not the
alert expression of influencing power
that belongs to the born non-commis-
| stoned officer of the British army. His
clothing, too, was unromantic, con-
sisting of a pair of khaki trousers
and patched vest hung on anyhow,
his feet thrust into broken canvas
bathing shoes.
He was reused by quick step on the
grass behind him, and started at once
into defiant life again. Tears would be
lasting disgrace if discovered, and
he became merely motionless gun
ner, looking out with stiff intentness
at the far faint line of the Sicilian
| coast.
aDayyl Whatever are you doing
Aersf"