Warren Hastings Miller
Published:
Total Pages: 205
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COLONEL COLVIN sat in a great roomy armchair in the Colvin Trophy Den, puffing reminiscently at a short black pipe and gazing abstractedly into the flickering flames of glowing logs in the rugged stone fireplace that was the heart of the Den. Sid, his son, and Sid’s chum, Scotty, were patching their cruiser moccasins with hand sewing-awls, the former now and then glancing over at his father anxiously. The Colonel looked peaked and worn,—a thin, gray ghost of his former robust self,—for his duty during the War had been onerous in the extreme, as head of the Army Detail Office at Washington. Sid feared a total collapse of the old Indian fighter, for nothing is harder on the system of a man raised to years of violent outdoor life than a long period of desk work. Sid knew the only road back to health. His father knew it too, but, so far, he had not made the first move toward hitting the trail again. However, a certain expectant look in the Colonel’s eyes, certain mysterious telegrams which the boy had been detailed to send, addressed to an old Army friend out in Arkansas, had distilled the air of big events to come which hovered persistently in the atmosphere of the Den. Sid himself was heavier and even more bronzed than when we saw him last, on his hunt for the Ring-Necked Grizzly out in Montana. The War, he realized, had been but an episode,—a tremendous episode, it is true—but still only an episode in his life. For some mysterious reason both he and Scotty had been transferred to the artillery, where he had risen to sergeant and had been the little king over two six-inch howitzers. His memories of the War had been of miles and miles of muddy roads and ceaseless rain; of tractors and tanks that had hauled his howitzers always forward behind the Front; of dog-tired days and weeks when they had crept toward the Vesle, ditched for passing staff cars and corduroyed out of mud sinks around shell holes. And then there had been glorious, stunning, vivid moments when he had stood between his two guns, telephone receivers over ears, shaken off his feet by the blinding yellow flashes all around him, watching the timing, correcting the ranges and deflections coming in from his spotter, or rushing to the gun shields when a Boche H. E. seemed about to register a direct hit. It was a man’s job, while it lasted; almost unnoticed, Nature had put on his upper lip a fine black fuzz that told the world that Sid was no longer a boy. To Scotty the War had been more than an episode. It had introduced a great change in the red-haired boy’s life, for he now wore a black bandage on his arm, and the Henderson service flag bore a gold star. Of them all, the good old Doctor had not returned. A Fokker ’plane bomb had found out the first-aid dressing station where the grizzled old physician had stood, bathed to his shoulders in gore, working without rest or sleep for the thirty-six hours of a major engagement. That was all; there was nothing left of the dugout after that shell had crashed through its roof and exploded. But there were aching hearts in the Henderson home because of it, and Scotty looked older and sadder. The worry of measuring his earning power against this new and hectic America that had emerged from the War had cast a settled sternness on his youthful face. Days in the open would now be a matter of precarious vacations for him!
