Mentioned In Dispatches: Chapter 2

Sunday evening, the twinned steps of the crenellated, tower-topped, brick-faced Seventh Regiment Armory were crowded with glamorous young women in broad straw hats who were speaking in high volume to big-jawed, moustached young officers who posed heroically while smoking cigarettes on the landing.   Hal could see no way through--the parasols were dangerous, the officers were unmoving.   Ordinarily he would have turned away from such a gathering and searched for another entrance, a tradesmen's door.   He had David Silver's business card in his left hand, his right hand free to signal the way to Herbie, and he moved sideways, "Pardon, excuse, pardon," as he worked through the shoulders and the skirts.  The bronze gate was chained open, yet the doorway was blocked by more of the officers and their ladies, all of whom who filled the vestibule inside as if this were a ticket line.   And then they were inside the dark-paneled entrance hall, decorated with statuary and life-sized heroic portraits, rosy from the afternoon sunshine on Park Avenue, the parquet floor lined with battle flags, trophy cases, loose chairs that held coats, hats, papers, and more of the swirling crowd of young soldiers who all seemed to have some privileged celebration to attend.

      "You there, what is it?" challenged a burly corporal at the table.  "Look here!"

      There was signage on an easel beside the table: "Do you know the whereabouts?"  And then there was a typed list of names with check marks attached to the board.  Hal returned, "Are you meaning me?"

      A stout man in a servant's coat ringing a gold dinner bell marched from a hallway across the entrance hall and then made his way around the banisters, calling out, "Supper served gents, first call, supper in the Drill Hall, supper!"  And then there was another cascade of boots down the split staircase, men shouting, "Company H!"  And "Company C!"

      "What's that you have?" the burly corporal asked Hal.

      "It's the card of an officer here.  Silver, David Silver. He told us to present to you."

      "Give me the card."

      "Are you Sergeant Bigelow?"

      "I'm Corporal Gogin.  You said Lieutenant Silver."

      "Yes," said Hal.

      "Stand back," was the order.  "Billy, c'mere."

      The two corporals discussed David Silver's card.  Hal heard the word "Jew" once from each of them.  They appeared annoyed.  Hal didn't like much about the corporals; they were short, flabby, older, with faint moustaches, patchy hair, and the fairer one was heavy enough to have folds of reddened flesh over his collar.  Also, they both smelled of beer at seven P.M.

      "Wait there," was the most Corporal Gogin returned, indicating a spot on the floor amid a growing pile of coats, newspapers, suitcases, blankets.

      Soon after, Gogin and his pal disappeared.  Too much time later, Hal figured he had watched each of the giant rooms of the first floor --such as the Board of Officers, the Colonels, Non-Commissioned Officers--empty out and fill again with young men either going to or returning from supper or not-much-disguised drinking parties.  In the cool of the evening, Hal witnessed a party of at least a dozen starkly inebriated men dash bootless from the front steps to the staircase and upwards in a race that permitted tackling others as they hurtled themselves forward.  After that, Hal heard horns and whistles outside, and he could see through the portal line of autos three abreast on Park Avenue; and now and again he heard the squeals of females.  After more smashing glass and banging metal, the two corporals returned, and along with them came a middle-aged officer, bare-headed, not playful, carrying a document, wearing a captain's bars, speaking hastily to the corporal, ". . . and the cars will be ready for us tomorrow at this time . . . let the company commanders know as they come in . . ."

      The second corporal said, "They're boasting they'd sleep it off by St. Louis."

      The captain asked Gogin, "Are you sober?"

      "Whatcha think?"

      "Corporal Bohn's sober as me," said Gogin.

      The captain shrugged and asked of the names attached to the signage, "How many on the muster list have reported in?"

      "I was told there would be a dozen by now."

      "Must've got hitched tonight," Gogin teased.

       "Lots of gals out there ready to pitch in," Bohn teased, producing vulgar sounds.

      The captain quit the pranksters; he noticed Hal and Herbie. "Who're they?"

       "For Silver."  Hal saw Bohn smirk again at the word "Silver."   "We've had 'em wait."

      "No, that's not it," Hal objected; he didn't care about the corporals anymore.  Herbie was hungry enough to weave in place.  "We've come because David Silver told us to call on Sergeant Bigelow.  We're volunteers."

      "No, you're not," Gogin barked.

      "You're delivery boys," Bohn said.  "Kosher and the like."

      "That's false," Hal asserted loudly.  "I told you."

      Gogin and Bohn, unready for a fight, staggered in place and moved heavily, stupidly.

      "And if you'd gone for beer less, you'd've listened."

      "Fuck you!" shouted Gogin.  "And fuck your idiot pal!"

      A few of the passing-by drunken soldiers recognized the sounds of an imminent brawl and circled back from the staircase to enjoy the contest.

      Hal put his hands out, fingers extended, at his side and measured the two.  Herbie imitated Hal, side by side.  Hal would take on Gogin first; he was less drunk; he would kick out his knee and level him with an elbow to the chest as he rounded the table; he would leave Gogin to Herbie's unbreakable grip while he then broke Bohn's nose swiftly and ended his smirking.

       Before the vulnerable corporals could figure how to posture, the captain stepped toward Hal with his hand out, "Well, aren't you just the thing?  I'm Doctor Lucas, Captain Lucas--I'm getting used to it, I was on the ward at Roosevelt just three hours ago--deputy surgeon of the regiment, and you boys are my prizes for the night.  They told me two dozen, and now I've merely two.  Have you got your bags at hand?"

      Hal shook the man's hand. "Mr. David Silver said to come by to Sergeant Bigelow.  We're mechanics, and we were told you needed mechanics."

      Lucas smiled beautifully and filled up the space with a confident style.  "I'll bet you are mechanics, I'll bet you are the rarest mechanics in Manhattan, because David wouldn't choose less.  We'll find David if he's upstairs. Have you dined?  Last night, we had veal chops."

      Several hectic, steamy hours later, Hal and Herbie, weary from their rush through the generous roast chicken supper found for them by Doctor Lucas, through the attention of the portly, grandfatherly Sergeant Bigelow, who not only wore them in with somber ceremony, "Do you swear and pledge . . . so help you God ... " to which Hal answered, "I do," and Herbie answered "Dooo!" but also issued them used uniforms and boots--for free so they didn't have to purchase them new from Brooks Brothers at $13.75 for the suit--and fresh bunk numbers and pillows in the rows of cots laid out in the railroad-shed-sized canyon of the Drill Hall, and told them to come again in the morning for their complete kit --"We don't have rifles for half the men, and we're one of the lucky regiments who have boots enough"--and the exuberantly affectionate, repeatedly apologetic devotion of First Lieutenant David Silver, Deputy Quartermaster, who had been looking for them with Sergeant Bigelow in the Quartermaster Room, found themselves pulled into the grandest and also perhaps wooziest chamber Hal had ever been inside, the cavernous Memorial Room on the first floor.   With a coffered wooden ceiling that showed chain marl stenciled in aluminum foil, with a surrounding frieze at the top of the walls that portrayed battles from prehistory to the Civil War, with the over mantle featuring a plaster eagle attacking a snake, the room illustrated every romance tale Hal had ever read aloud to Herbie.  There was even a small balcony raised beside the giant fireplace as if Scheherazade would step out to gaze down.  It was like wandering into the backstage of a tale by Walter Scott, Jules Verne and Conan Doyle.  And now, in his used laundered uniform, used polished boots, along with Herbie, he stood behind David Silver as they were led in through a tumult of state and city dignitaries to be introduced to the men whose Overlands they would be attending, Colonel Willard C. Fiske and Lieutenant Colonel Robert McLean.

      "Volunteer mechanics!"  Colonel Fiske was gray, meaty, erect, moustached and cordial; also he had a reputation as indulgent of his men and well liked for it, a trait not much appropriate to wartime but suitable to the social exigencies of a fashionable regiment.  "Look at the miracle.  Boys, boys, I didn't hold that there was one mechanic in New York whom I could locate in time and persuade to come along, not one!  And here they are, by God.  The miracle in hand, the night before.  Lieutenant Silver, this is fine, mighty fine.  Robby!"

      Lt. Colonel McLean, deputy regimental commander, a handsomer version of the avuncular Fiske, approached with a cigarette in hand.  "Very fine," was McLean's verdict when Hal and Herbie were explained.  "Who's the taller one?"

      "Private Coolidge," David Silver answered.

      "He looks like a mechanic," pronounced McLean.  "Yours"--he addressed Colonel Fiske, speaking of Herbie--"looks like a leprechaun."

      The dignitaries laughed readily, spilling liquor on the oriental carpet.  Hal did not like this laughter and watched to see if David Silver joined in.  Thankfully, not.

      "Good for you, boys.  Keep close to my automobiles.  They'll be in our baggage section.   Get yourself in order.  Beds satisfactory, food good?  And say farewell to your families, we'll be en route tomorrow evening."

      "The president, the Congress and the Pennsylvania Railroad willing," joked Colonel Fiske.  The assembly roared again at this witticism, and servants refilled glasses as they changed the topic to the weather in Brownsville, Texas, this time of year - "so hot, Satan vacations!" - and to the Pullman accommodations for the officers on the four-day journey across country.

      Hal overheard pieces of these conversations and then gratefully followed David Silver's kindness to lead them to the exit and bid them goodnight.

      "Thank you, sincerely and deeply, for this favor to me," said David Silver at parting.  "You've made me a success, and I owe it to you.  I owe you more and more."

      "We are leaving tomorrow?" Hal asked.

      "The plan is to ferry to Jersey City tomorrow evening and load the cars in two or three sections.   I'm scheduled in the first section, in the Pullmans, with the officers.  You and your brother will be in the Headquarters Company, also in the first section.  It's a four- or five-day trip.  Perhaps we'll get to try out the Overlands at our stops."

 Hal flinched a little; in his extreme weariness at leading Herbie through this grandiose, strangely unserious building, a rich man's fantasy of a military club, and in his astonishment at the behavior of the militiamen as they continued to carouse well after midnight in the cavernous Drill Hall with shouts of "Hooorah for Laura!" and "Send her over here!" from the hundreds of fellows, Hal had started to see that he and Herbie were profoundly out of place.  These were professionals, sportsmen, collegians, society's treasured sons, from the tennis star Dennis Hill, who was sergeant major of the regiment, to the Yale, Columbia, and Princeton men who sang bawdy songs, mostly based on "There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight," and "The Girl I Left Behind Me," with rude substitutions.  And yet they were all bound for Texas and the hottest, harshest climate in the United States, and maybe to Mexico bristling with bandits as well.

      As they sat on their cots, ready for sleep, Hall addressed Herbie, "We'll get our rest and a fine big breakfast, hotcakes and oysters maybe and lots of runny eggs for you.  We'll get a message to Mr. Vernon where to send our pay.  We've got twenty dollars' paper traveling money in my sock and five dollars' paper in your sock for reinforcement."

      Herbie lay down serenely and closed his eyes.  "Yeah, good, Hal."

      Hal addressed himself with the kernel of his doubts, War with Mexico?  It says so in the newspapers.  And we go tomorrow?  He closed his eyes. It's hard to believe, was his last cogent thought and, he learned, a good one, because the next morning and afternoon and evening passed without orders to travel.  A gruff, educated crankiness washed through the fairytale castle of the Armory: Where are the cars?  Where is the baggage?  Who's to blame?  Is this a national crisis or a camp meeting?  It wasn't until half-past eleven on Monday night that the Colonel Fiske, weary from entertaining pompous, insistent well-wishers, learned himself that the Pennsy had finally found cars for his three battalions; he reported to his command that they would depart the Armory after breakfast to ferry across to Jersey City's yards.

      By then, very late again in the sleeping ranks in the Drill Hall, not talkative this time, eerily subdued, Hal and Herbie were better adjusted to life in this frantic boys' club; indeed, they had learned how to maneuver between the bountiful menus à la carte, the constantly catered deliveries from the city's best hotels and clubs of Suprême de turbotin Walewska, or Poularde Massene, or Chaufroi de caillies Lucullus, salade, or Fonds d'artichauts Maintenon, and a pastry that Herbie adored called Parfait praliné, friandises.  The wine did not tempt them, as they were temperance.  The luxurious facilities did please them, including vast men's rooms, with generous baths and gleaming shower stalls and servants handing thick towels and fresh soap for the asking.  There were quandaries that escaped them.  Hal could not solve the collegians: they were too self-congratulatory, arch, indifferent to their surroundings, purposefully incoherent, usually speaking in jargon, references to unknown places such as "on Nassau" or "in the Quad."   Then again, Hal could solve his immediate needs with the orderly behavior that was his vocational strength, his grace-given gift.  During the steamy day, Hal had taken advantage of the delay, and he and Herbie had raced in their uniforms to Pearl Street to arrange for their modest wardrobe possessions to be stored for a fee with Mr. Burnius-- "I won't keep your room unused for you!" --had stopped at the Merchant's Bank branch on Broadway to confirm that Mother could retrieve their account, had hurried to the National Biscuit Company garage to give their notice--". . . and the militia'll waste you, waste you, Jesus, Joseph and Mary, God bless . . ." was Mr. Vernon's farewell--and had arranged for their final pay to be kept on account for their mother to draw on; and later on, returning for another extravagant supper from the à la carte menus of the Astor, Sherry's, the Ritz-Carlton or St. Regis hotels along with desserts from the Waldorf-Astoria and Delmonico's, he and Herbie had fallen in with new acquaintances in the Headquarters Company area, such as two strongmen from Fulton Street who had joined the Seventh on the recruiting march last Friday, and such as an educated, college-bound young man who spoke in a genteel manner and was kind to Herbie.

       Reveille in the Drill Hall at 5 A.M. brought more easy exchanges for Hal and Herbie with their new comrades, each of them eager and posturing on what promised to be the most hectic day of their lives so far.

      "Right rare fat-assed, selfish bastards, dem officers," declared Bill "Bull" Steers to Hal and Herbie in the queue to the washrooms.  They were posting the assignments on the special trains in Jersey City: the first section was said to include Pullman cars for officers, only, while the enlisted men rode tourist cars.  "You'll see, chums," warned Bull.

      "Same as sergeants," offered Alf "Kid" Wendt.

      "What about sergeants?" asked Bull Steers.

      "They're selfish bastards like dem officers," answered Wendt.

      "Stick yer sergeants."

      Bull Steers was a towering, big-headed, rusty-haired, broad-shouldered, long hairy-armed strongman, and his comrade Kid Wendt, with black wiry hair, not as tall, was even broader, more barrel-like, with giant hands that made vast fists, with the physical confidence of a man who had won money as a prize-fighter, which he had, as "Kid McCoy," because, he explained in muttering, an Irish fist was considered more worthy of wagering.  They were teamsters from the Edison Illuminating Company, and they had joined up last Friday mostly because they disliked their foreman and their jobs, and as soon as they'd learned they could get paid for marching with playboys and tennis players, and camping in Texas around cheap Mexican whores, they were volunteers.

      Later, in the mess line, Herbie's new friend the fair, tall, eyeglass-wearing Lefferts Hutton of Oyster Bay, spoke to Hal about the trip, ". . . and I've been thinking that we're Headquarters Company, and we'll be sent to the back of the cars.   But I don't want to be a clerk typist or bookkeeper, and I don't want to ride with the other clerks.  I want to ride with you and Mr. Steers and Mr. Wendt.  Can we ask?  It would be a favor if you asked the sergeant."

      "You want to ride with us, you can, sure."

      "It's acceptable?"

      Hal smiled.  Hutton was trembling.  "Yes. Happy."

      "It means much to me."

      "Good.  Is that all?"  Hal asked, expecting there was more.

      He started softly, then ". . . well, some of my friends, they'd like to sit with us, too, if it's not too much to ask.  Just three or four of the Greys.  We were at school together, you see, and we're not entirely confident of what we're about.  I mean, we've been in the Greys these years, but we only drilled and marched around now and again, and we never actually went anywhere as a group, not like this, in a war."

      Hal asked, "What are the Greys?"

      "The Knickerbocker Greys," said Lef Hutton.  "A sort of junior regimental club that you start when you're young.  There're a lot of us here."

      Hal liked Bull Steers and Kid Wendt a deal; they were rough-cut, unpretentious, cunning, territorial, working men who knew value and understood teamwork.   Lefferts Hutton was an odd fit with them: he was off to college in the fall; he was bookish, considerate, and absent practical knowledge, such as watching over his own equipment.  Then again, it was Herbie who had brought the shy Hutton to Hal's attention, as the two had met when they'd waited for their rifles to be issued.  Also Lefferts Hutton was kind to Herbie and understood his run-together words, and that was all Hal needed for qualifications; and they fell in together as two buglers sounded "Assembly" again and again, the twenty-six notes repeating, echoing throughout the building, and then the huge doors of the Drill Hall swung open to Madison Avenue at a quarter-past eight.

      "You ready?" Hal asked Herbie, who was lined up in front of him.

      Herbie straightened his bedroll, kit bag, and cartridge belt, gripped his new rifle, grinned with the pleasure of a child in a circus big tent.

      "Shit, this is gonna be boilin', " said Bull Steers.

      "No talking, please!" requested their new sergeant, a tubular, thin-haired, eyeglass wearing, cautious college man named James Van Santvoord.

      "Stuff yer please," muttered Kid Wendt.

      Two thousand immediately awaited the regiment outside.  The curious had been kept a block from the Armory during the night by bayonet-wielding sentries; but now they surged forward to find good spots, and the cheering, hat waving, whistling and bell-ringing began and never stopped, rattling off the sides of the buildings.  Colonel Fiske stepped to the fore of the column.  The Fife and Drum Corps began, "It's a Long Way to Tipperary," and the march began into the breathtaking, damp cloud of heat, around the corner to Park Avenue and then south.  Preceded by mounted New York police and by Old Glory and the staff officers, First Battalion's most fashionable and prestigious companies A, B, C, D led Second Battalion's younger, ambitious companies E, F, G, H, which in turn led Third Battalion's largely volunteer and latecomer Companies I, J, K, L, and then came the auxiliaries, including a machine gun company, as well as Hal and Herbie and the teamsters in the Headquarters Company, and also the Medical Corps.

      Once on the move, Hal, trim and proper in his khaki suit, wishing as did everyone else they had been issued summer uniforms, found his campaign hat tight, the bedroll and kit bag light, the boots and puttees acceptable, and that carrying a new-made .30 caliber Army rifle on his right shoulder smelling of gun-grease and polish--he'd been handed the rifle that morning out of a packing case--was both peculiar and matter-of-fact.  He got used to being a soldier simply, almost as if he was playing a part he'd read about all his life but never imagined he'd be in, and he was encouraged that Herbie looked equally at ease as he walked side by side with his new friend Lefferts Hutton, who did struggle some with the nearly nine-pound weight of the Springfield and the awkwardness of the thick bedroll and flopping kit.  The sincere cheering from onlookers made the walk in the sun seem light-at-heart, festive, theatrical, privileged, a musical entertainment with band music and a booming, stirring drumbeat.  Hal saw all ages of men and women and lots of children in their good clothes waving straw hats and white handkerchiefs, calling out, "Hooray for the Seventh Regiment!" and "Bully for you!" and "God bless you, boys!" and "Show 'em how New York fights!" and "Ray-ay-ayyyyaaaay!"   The Fife and Drum Corps at the fore of the column changed from "Tipperary" to more American, patriotic, martial tunes, "The Yankee Doodle Boy," and "Stars and Stripes Forever."  And when they passed the big Pierce-Arrow that contained the governor of New York and his military aides, each unit was directed by a sergeant, "Eyes right!" and the governor, a diminutive, clean-shaven, tailored man in morning clothes, lifted his high silk hat in praise and smiled with the confidence of his Republican ticket.

      The column turned again on Fifty-eighth Street, bunched up into groups that were six across and five deep, and quickly crossed town to the Sixth Avenue El station, where it broke the line of march to mount the wooden steps to the special trains.  Hal and Herbie crowded onto the last car of the last train and stood, like their comrades, breathing hard from the heat, swigging from their canteens.

      "When's eats?" Kid Wendt called to Van Santvoord.

      The young sergeant was stumped.  "Cold cuts in the Pennsy cars, I'm told."

      "Didj'a see the sportin' gals cheerin'?" Steers asked Hal.

      Hal watched Lefferts Hutton deep in whispering conversation with Herbie and another pal of Hutton's, a tiny, wan, willowy fellow named Emmons Ellis, Jr.   Herbie was making friends easily, and Hal was discovering that the ranks of rich collegians included not just topping-it popinjays but also these solicitous, brainy fellows.

      Herbie laughed at some wit by Hutton, and Hal winked at his brother.

      The morning's progress slowed to a grumbling confusion as the regiment detrained at the Canal Street station and made its way piecemeal to reach West Street and the Desbrosses Ferry of the Pennsylvania Railroad.  The relatives and intimate friends of the regiment now dominated the well wishers, and the demonstrations of farewell were emotive.  Hal saw young and old women weeping wildly, sobbing in each other's arms, some holding up small children and screaming, "See.  Baby's waving at Papa!" and "Oh, dear!  Oh, dear!"  The older men stood stony, smoking cigarettes, watching women cry out, "My two sons!  My two sons!" and "Be good, be a good boy, sweetheart!" and "Don't forget to wear your flannels!" and "Write me, you promised!"

      The scramble onto the open-decked ferryboat Chicago was random and sluggish; at last, Hal found room to flop down with his mates on the afterdeck and remove his sweat-soaked felt campaign hat as the ferry sounded its horn to salutes from other ferries.

      "Men!" cried out one of the marquee-handsome, moustached staff officers nearby, "Colonel Cornelius Vanderbilt sends the personal greetings of General O'Ryan!  And Colonel Schuyler sends the personal greetings of General Wood!  The President put out the call, and the New York National Guard Sixth Division answers the call, and the New York Seventh is first to the nation's defense!"

      "Who's that?" Steers asked.

      "All fuckin' high hats," said Wendt.

      Hal answered from his lessons with Mr. Finkelstein, "General Wood gave the order for us to go today.  He got in trouble for saying we weren't trained and ready."   Hal pointed to the quay, where the thousands of onlookers were now ringed around a phalanx of military uniforms and policemen, standing between the Pennsylvania Railroad wharf and the United Fruit wharf.  "I suspect the colonels are over there, and one of them's a Vanderbilt and one of them's a Schuyler, and they are high hats."

      Steers said,  "My feet hurt already.  Where's my second breakfast?"

      Chicago rolled into the wakes of two passing steamers as Hutton moved closer to project his airy voice past the grinding engines and through the whipping wind.  "John F. O'Ryan is the New York militia general, not regular Army.  Major General Leonard Wood is commander of the Department of the East, out on Governor's Island."  Hutton pointed south past the Battery to the broad, crowded harbor.  "He's old, and smart, and not politically popular, since he's Colonel Roosevelt's pal from the Rough Riders.  The President's people don't like him.  General Wood told the newspapers he was acting under direct orders of the Secretary of War--that's Newton Baker, the old Mayor of Cleveland, who's not a military man.    Hal's right, General Wood caused himself grief when he talked to the reporters.  About us, he said, 'God only knows where they are going,' when they asked him.  This didn't please the president.  Little about Colonel Roosevelt and his friends pleases the president.  And now the Colonel's proposed to raise a volunteer division of twelve thousand men to invade Mexico under his command as a major-general, and he says it in a way to make President Wilson look unprepared and unimportant."

      "What kind of volunteers?" asked Hal.

      "The kind that can ride and shoot, I suppose," said Hutton.  "You know Colonel Roosevelt.  This is the campaign season, and the Colonel's backing Judge Hughes against the president.  A lot of politicians want to raise volunteer regiments.  The Democrats think the regiments should be all Irish, and all German, and the like, like in the Civil War.  Like the Sixty-ninth.  Governor Whitman and Mayor Mitchel are against it.  No more hyphens, they say.  The hyphens are un-American, they say."

      "We're hyphens, ain't we?" Wendt asked with the flicker of a grin.  "Silk-stockings, ain't we?  Get it?  Hey?  You didn't know I could spell, didja?"

      "Ya can't and shut yer hole," said Steers.

      Hutton, aiming to be considerate to the giant teamsters, hesitated with a soft smile.  "The Colonel does know his electioneering.   He also knows he's too old to be a major general.  He's nearly fifty-eight years old."

      "Teddy Roosevelt's all right," said Steers.   "That sit with you?"

      "He's a great man," said Hutton, whose family was an Oyster Bay neighbor of the Roosevelt's, whose father had boomed Roosevelt against Hughes.  "Undoubtedly."

      "How about you?" Steers asked Herbie.

      Herbie, gleeful with the boat, the company, nodded and said, "Hal likes him."

      "What?" asked Kid Wendt.

      "We like him," said Hal.  "We've seen him more than once at City Hall Park.  He'll speak with any man who speaks to him.  He shook Herbie's hand.  And he doesn't act high hat."

      Wendt remarked, "I guess he's all right."

      Steers groaned. "I'm starved.  Sea travel makes me."

      Four Army aeroplanes with buzzing, roaring engines floated in the sky from the general direction of Brooklyn.  It was rare though not unheard of to see aviators over the harbor, as the Army used Governor's Island as a fledgling aerodrome; however, this was clearly meant as a tribute the departing Seventh.  Hal watched the quartet slide sideways more than forward in the drafts.  They were Curtiss-Wright JNs, called Jennies in the newspapers, tan and yellow wood and canvas tractor-pulled biplanes, with huge propellers, V-12 water-cooled engines visible in the open cowl, painted with stars and the numbers 11, 12, 19, 20 on the fuselages.  Only in comparison to a chicken could they be called birdlike. The soldiers at the fantail of the ferry were joyous, pointing, crying out, waving their campaign hats and cheering like baseball fans as the aeroplanes came around to swing two by two, wing to wing together, to flyover the Chicago.

      As they swooped, the aviators raised their gloved hands in farewell.  Herbie was ecstatic, leaping with both arms flapping back.  Hal could easily see the lead aviator, No. 11, grinning brilliantly, white teeth like headlights, and giving them a slowly delivered salute, a sturdy American signal for Godspeed, good luck.  Hal smiled gently at the gesture, recognizing it as heartfelt fraternity and robust respect, though it would be for thousands of miles and several months before Hal realized that, because of his serendipitous glance above the North River, this was the first time he had ever seen his lifelong friend, ally, brother-in-arms and eventual brother-in-law, too, John "Mac" McAdoo.

 "That's for me," Lef Hutton told Hal and Herbie as they disembarked at the tar-reeking and goods-heaped Pennsylvania Railroad wharf and lined up slowly by company.  "I'm going to join the Aero Club of America when I get to Princeton, first business."

      "The Aero Club is joining up to the Army," contributed Hutton's pal Emmons Ellis, Jr.   "My father says they're paying $10,000 for a Curtiss-Wright aircraft and selling them to the Army at $1 each.  Those four are probably some of them. They want to send forty-eight of them to Pershing, and they're asking for volunteers."

      "Have you been up?" Lef Hutton asked Hal.

      Hal smiled at the cheerful inquiry of a rich man's son.  "No."

      The lanky, mustached officer was back; this time, however, the shouting was done by the fair-haired, pink-faced, slender First Sergeant of Headquarters Company, another tennis player and much older ex-Knickerbocker Gray named Carrington Ahern, who was neither loud enough nor clear enough.  ". . . and Colonel Fiske wants you to know, we've promised New York we're ready to detrain and fight!  We'll show those dirty Mex' how the Silk-Stocking Regiment fights!""

      "Shit, these boys couldn't fight sleep," muttered Bull Steers.

      Kid Wendt laughed, punching the air, "I told ya.  Hyphens fightin'!"

      Hal laughed, too.  The regiment's officers and sergeants were the most politely deluded senior gentlemen he'd ever witnessed.  Fight with what?  They'd have to provide ammunition; and many of the boys carried their rifles like golf clubs.

      Ahern continued mumbling, ". . . well, the last two place cars are assigned to us."

       "Where're the Pullmans?"

      "Look'ee.   Jes' back from Grant's Army!"

      Hal looked across to the uniformly shabby cars of the two passenger sections of the special trains.  Headquarters Company was assigned to the first section of twenty-five tourist cars.   While the Fife and Drum Corps boomed out favorites with new lyrics sung by the rowdies up front, such as "It's a Long, Long Way to Carranza!" and "We'll Have a Hot Time in Old Mexico Tonight!" Hal judged the equipment: the cars were all uniformly paint-peeling, dust-caked, frame-cracked, ancients.  Something had gone wrong with the Pennsy's inventory.  Not only were the officers not to have Pullman sleepers, with room for their servants, baggage and pets, but also the whole regiment was not to have more than retired Wagener's with sealed or boarded windows.

      The caterwauling by the well-wishers on the platform was now maudlin.  A pep leader in white linen shirt and trousers with a speaking trumpet marked with a "P" leapt from the platform to shout, "Three long hoorays for the Seventh Regiment!  Hip-hip . . ." 

      "Hooooo-rayyyyyy!" returned the crowd in resonant obedience.

      "Mind your rifles!" Ahern shouted.  "Toward the last two cars!"

      Bull Steers was griping, ". . . ain't fit for dead goats."

      Now Hal discovered the genius inside him, the skill that set him apart from the Seventh's officers and sergeants and made him a natural leader of men.  He was orderly, tidy, fastidious, logical, methodical, territorial, orthodox, tireless, perspicacious, stubborn, but above all, orderly.  He sought order.  He recognized order.  He imposed order where there was none.  He knew that order created more order and that the orderly state created authority.

       Hal made his decision and told Steers and Wendt, "Last car, end platform, soon as they release us."

      "Mount up, by company!" commanded a glamorous officer.

      "Follow me, quickly," said Hal, and he was off for the car's rear steps.

      In the free-for-all that followed the order to get onboard, Hal and Bull Steers took charge of leading their people, which now included additional Knickerbocker Greys chums of Lefferts Hutton--not only Ellis but also the compact Fiske Burroughs, Whipple Pennypacker and Courtney Tripp--and securing them the best roost available.  Hal didn't balk at the decrepit, moldy, smelly condition of the car.  Make it work for us was his task.   Hal chose the end benches, farthest from the W.C., near the old, damaged Franklin stove.   He planted Herbie on the aisle on one side and Wendt on the other to secure their four-bench terrain, and then stowed their bedrolls, kit bags underneath the benches, with the rifles stacked inboard.  Hal used his bayonet to force the windows open or lever out the nails of the boards.  The other guardsmen entered reluctantly, as if this couldn't be true, and bunched up staring at the filthiness, waiting to be told what to do; yet Van Santvoord was unavailable, gone forward with Ahern and the other company non-commissioned officers.  Hal issued blunt orders all around him and soon his seven were ship-shape.  The others gawked, and when Hal saw that their discomposure disturbed his arena, he barked directions to them as well.  Steers and Wendt followed Hal's lead by jostling the boys to obey; and when that didn't transform the car fast enough, Herbie, Hutton, Ellis, Burroughs, Pennypacker and Tripp pitched in to stow equipment in Hal's style.  Soon, the fully occupied car of sixty guardsmen was settling in with two privates to a bench; bedrolls, kits and rifles stowed, windows cleared of grime and opened; floorboard holes plugged, W.C. washed out with an ancient box of soap flakes they found in its locker, the aisle swept clean of trash, and a duty roster under way to maintain the W.C.

      The delinquent Van Santvoord emerged from the forward car, bewildered and gratified, and behind him came the pink-cheeked Ahern, asking Hal, "Who're you?"

      Hal, in the aisle examining the cracked roof, told him.

      Ahern was eye to eye with Hal, though about half his breadth.  "You want to be one of my sergeants?"

      "I could use the help," Van Santvoord pleaded.

      "Tell 'em no," muttered Steers.

      "You're both invited to be sergeants here," said Ahern to Hal and Steers.  "They didn't replace my mess sergeant, who didn't make it back from Nova Scotia.  I'm a mess sergeant short, don't have a quartermaster, have only corporals in two platoons, and I'm six corporals short in the other platoon, too, and thirty privates short for the company.  If you'll take Jamey's job,"--he meant Van Santvoord, who listened passively--"then he can step up to the mess job."

      "What's sergeant pay?" Hal asked.

      Ahern looked around for answers.  "Maybe a dollar a day."

      "And a corporal?"

      Ahern guessed, "Seventy cents?"

      "What do you get?" Hal asked.

      Ahern was frustrated.  "I don't know.   I guess more than a dollar.  What of it?"

      Without answering, or providing even a grunt of ambiguity, Hal and Steers left Ahern to speak ineffectively to the three squads in their car while Hal looked out the rear platform to confirm that the next car was the most important in the first section, the corned beef car, where the tinned goods and hardtack were stowed floor to ceiling.  The rumor on the ferry and in the yards was that there would be no hot meals till the border.

      "This'll be a hungry trip," Hal told Steers, "and we'll need opportunities."  Hal reasoned,  "Everyone sent back for cold cuts in First and Second Battalion has to go past us, and then come back past us again, loaded up with corned beef."

       "I like it," said Steers, "We're last on, but first to the eats.  You got sharp thoughts."

      "Nothing crooked.  Useful." They dismounted purposefully, walked to the end of the second section and then over the tracks to the baggage section, by a 2-10-2 Sante Fe locomotive, No. 8363, a veteran Pennsy dynamo and its heaped-full coal car, hauling thirty freight rolling stock: flatbed, stock cars and boxcars with a battered caboose.  Depot men swinging crates onto the gangplanks were still loading a half-dozen boxcars.  Hal and Steers walked down the line to the stock cars, loaded with the officer's saddle horses, the teamster's draught horses, and the treasured mules.  Steers called, "Those're the wagons, that's our'n," and they peered onto the last flatbed.

      Hal climbed up to inspect under a tarpaulin.  "That's what I wanted to see."  Hal meant the two Willys-Overlands tied down among the wagon beds, stacks of wagon wheels, spare parts, ironmonger's tools.  "Those're my meal ticket for as long as possible." 

      Whistles sounded plaintively from the locomotives to hurry the loaders.  Hal and Steers hopped to the end of the section and to the trainmen's car, the caboose.

      "You boys lost?" asked a trainman from platform; he was smoking; he expectorated manfully.  "Your car's back that way."

      "I'm Bull Steers of Fulton Street."

      "I know you?"

      "Not well enough to speak poor to, Father Spit."

      "Bugger off, lad," said the trainman.

      Hal remarked, "We want those two automobiles and the livery well-handled.  We want you sober next time we check."

      After one o'clock, amid screaming civilians and hooting factory whistles, the first section finally departed the yard, with the second and third sections to follow in ten-minute intervals.  "Texas!" came the cry.  "Faster!" was the answer, a breeze finally through the car as men opened their tunics and wet their foreheads.  Everyone was hungry, calling out for supper.  And since Ahern did not have an answer, Hal asked his people close at hand to use their private supplies.  Parcels of food sent by mothers and sweethearts and the hotel kitchen passed down the benches.   Cigarettes and pipes--college men liked pipes--lit up in the gusts.  Hal settled by Herbie and watched the vast, white-capped blue water of the harbor and then the blunt, slender towers of the New York skyline vanish behind the bluffs of easternmost New Jersey.

      On the Newark platform, four clergymen stood waving their black bowler hats with their congregations behind them; at Linden, four small boys with a faded forty-six star flag fired cap guns in salute; down the road, a man without arms leaped in tribute; at Rahway, spry young women waved American flags and cheered at the thick-haired, grinning upper torsos of the boys hanging daredevil fashion from the windows.  On rolled the three special sections, on past the gloriously summery afternoons of Metuchen, New Brunswick, Franklin Park, Deans, Monmouth Junction, Plainsboro, Princeton Junction, and Lawrence to slow to a walk through the Trenton station and over the Delaware and on to sunbathed Pennsylvania.  Soiled factory men, giggling shop girls, bent-backed plowmen, hat-waving horsemen, naked boys out of the swimming holes, bearded veterans in their July fourth clothes hanging with ribbons and pins, church choirs in their maroon robes, town hall and Grange Hall staffs bearing a community banner, idle trainmen, worn switchmen, all manner of flags with forty-eight or forty-six or forty-five, forty-four or forty-three stars, and one Old Glory with faded pink and purple stripes and thirty-eight stars, stood by and waved or cheered or just stared.

      "What's thirty-eight stars?" Hal asked Hutton.

      Tiny Emmons Ellis knew the answer; removing his eyeglasses to clean the cinders, he recited, "Nevada was the thirty-sixth, Nebraska the thirty-seventh, Colorado the thirty-eighth."

       "And forty-three?" asked Hal for the fun of the inquiry.

      Ellis ticked off five states with the digits of his left hand, "North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Washington, within days in '89.  Idaho the next year.  Forty-three."

       "Bookworms," teased Wendt, "Goin' to fight Mex with bookworms.  I'll heave books."

      A phenomenon Hal noted along the road was that no onlooker remained seated as the special appeared, the locomotives sounding the howling whistle through the chuff-chuff-chuff at each crossing and depot, everyone springing up as if at the pledge of allegiance at school, men with hats on their breasts, or veterans saluting, veterans tended in wheelchairs saluting.  Onto the direct route across the Schuylkill river, bypassing central Philadelphia, on to the shimmering green fields of knee-high silky corn; to Frazer and then into the emerald and purple afternoon of wheat fields, weaving though the richest acres of Lancaster County's Pomeroy, Parkesburg, Lenovel, Atglen, Christiana, Gap, Kinzer, Leaman Place, Gordonville, Ronk, the Amish Bird-in-Hand, where plowmen waved thanksgiving and peace.  Then Witmer, and through the big town of Lancaster to the Susquehanna River Valley to E-town, the Elizabethtown Anabaptist center; and then Harrisburg by twilight and a waiting reception committee on the platform for their first official halt.

      A brass band blared "Stars and Stripes Forever" up ahead, and Hal leaned out to look down the line.  There were thousands of Pennsylvanians waiting in the gentle gold and pink twilight at the platform of a huge, three-storey cottage-built depot.   The crowd was frantically waving straw hats and small American flags and cheering like a stadium.  It's an excited country, Hal thought, and it's filled with healthy, unblinkered people who like to celebrate and demonstrate.

      "We're with you boys!" called the Pennsylvanians.  "Show 'em who we are!" called another.  "Hooray-ayyyyy for the Seventh!" 

      "Girls!" cried a soldier.

      Five hundred male faces leaped to the open windows as a battalion of young woman in glowing white blouses, gray and black voile skirts, their hair piled high with combs and tucked beneath festooned straw hats, came parading out of the depot arm in arm, by twos and threes, carrying oversized straw baskets filled with surprises, spreading through the shed, down the steps, onto Market Street as it crossed the tracks at Fifth Street.

      "Have you got room for us at home!" called the boys.

      "Hoorrayyy!" cried the girls.

      "What's your name, gorgeous?"

      "Do you want sandwiches?  What kind?"

      "Hey, hey, we want you to come back here!" called the boys.

      Hal, at the windows with his campaign hat out for the daring girls who dashed close along the road heaving their presents to the boys, used his free hand to pass Herbie small parcels of sandwiches, apples and tomatoes, and a handful of rock candy and then another of Klein bars.  Hal told the shy Hutton and his friends to get their hats out; he saw Steers and Wendt already chatting with several tall older girls who looked worshipful.

      "Herbie, give me the kit bags empty!" Hal ordered.  There was one slender, black-haired, black-cat-eyed beauty who stared at Hal until he stared back; then she gave an instantaneous small pink-lipped smile before she lowered a curtain of lashes over her black eyes.

      "Hello!" Hal shouted.  He stopped himself.  Respectful, he thought

      "Come on board!" called the boys.

      "Come to Mexico with us!"

      "Want to join?"

      The ecstasy of imagination felt like only moments, though it was a fifteen-minute stopover, and then the Sante Fe locomotive whistled and chuffed and jerked forward.  Hal watched the white blouses until they merged into a long bright stream, and then he turned his head to look ahead, where the dozen tracks merged, crossed and parted again into two main routes to the west, one to Lake Erie and Chicago, another to cross and follow the river to its source in the burly green Appalachians.  They were Mississippi-bound.   Hal's thoughts were jumbled.  He and Herbie and the others shared the Harrisburg cheeses and cold chicken, stowed the rest neatly.  Hal directed them to get out their blankets for the chill mountain air, helped Herbie tuck into the floor at his feet, then settled in for a cramped, aching night of banging up the road grades.  Closing his eyes, Hal fixed on the image of the shockingly friendly smile of that beautiful, unknown, lost, black-haired girl with the feline eyes.  "The Girl I Left Behind Me," Hal hummed affectionately, and after a stanza, Herbie joined in with a tenor hum. 
 

      Cold beans, dry bread, roasting cars, no ice, bad backs, all was ignored on the second day for the joy of the locomotive race to St. Louis between the Pennsylvania Railroad specials carrying the Seventh and the New York Central's specials carrying the Seventy-first  Regiment, which had departed hours before the Seventh left Jersey City.  On the first day it had seemed a trifle: something for the newspapermen on board, an invention to portray the scale of the challenge to deploy, for the first time in America's one hundred forty years, an entire division of militia within days, led by these two prime, lauded, spirited regiments already on the road.  On the second pell-mell day of rolling through torrid cornfields, however, it became a fierce concern for every man in the cars.  Now the demand was for where the 71^st was reported?  Now the demand was over what constituted victory?  Must all special sections arrive together, or only the first to reach the St. Louis yards? --a complication obliged by the fact that that 7^th's second section had been delayed by a hot box outside of Pittsburgh and was now running behind the baggage section.  Mostly now, the demand was for speed.

      At Richmond, across the Indiana border, as the locomotive paused for coal, the guardsmen were modestly grateful that the entire town had turned out on a scorching Thursday afternoon to salute the special --although no one disguised his frustration at the slow pace of heartfelt patriotism.   Led by one of Roosevelt's Progressive Party stalwarts, Mayor William Robbins, with flags flapped like stalks, fully thousands at the Pan Handle depot stood hatless and weepy as the brass band played the Star-Spangled Banner.

      "Damn, what now?" cried out the boys when an officer detrained in respect to the tribute.

      "At last, get on, make steam!" they cried when the train whistle sounded.

      The delay at Indianapolis was mostly acceptable--chiefly because the Seventy-first was reported trailing well behind at Richmond--when they were invited off the ancient cars for another special section made up of the promised Pullman sleepers for the officers and tourist sleepers for the enlisted, all except two of the older-style tourist day cars, at the end of the twenty-one cars.  In burst of cagey, timely aggression, Hal led his handful across the platform to the new section, followed by the entire car of boys who had obeyed him since Jersey City, now spontaneously and deeply attached to Hal's leadership and sense of proportion.  Hal in a snap chose one of the fresh Pullman tourist sleepers, leading the way to secure their car with Steers at one end, Wendt at the other to chase off the curious.  Hal ordered the privates and corporals to sweep the aisles, stow the packs and rifles, clean the windows, wash the W.C., get the stove cleaned for fires when they found kindling.   "Set it right," Hal told those who hesitated or slumped, "each man give a hand, quickly, no smoking, move it!  And I want the can mopped out again.  Bull, get those two boys to find us a pail and mop in the depot!  And soap, hear me!"  And,  "Kid, into the depot, and grab what they have for kindling!"  When sergeants Ahern and Van Santvoord came through, looking to exchange their car for this newly shipshape and commodious one, asking if anyone had seen their Pullman porter, Hal ignored them and called for lights out as soon as possible.  He wanted his car secure before the special jerked forward.   "Get the upper berths down!  Herbie, help them, show them how!  Lef, show them!  Choose -- choose, quickly.   Double up when you can.  You can do it.   Make the aisle clear for the left over sleepers.  Hurry.  Lights out in three minutes!  No smoking!  We're going to sleep!"    The stop at Terre Haute after midnight, more band-playing, speechifying, choir serenading, was easy to ignore in the cars thick and filled with blanket-wrapped, dozing, unwashed men; but the boys did let out some vulgar remarks at the townspeople rapping on the car windows to pass in tobacco and cups of tea, and there was a moaning of, "Damned Hoosiers, prattling and sobbing, let a man sleep," as the special huffed again across the state line and through the southern Illinois night of a half-moon over the corn and sweet victory across the Mississippi rail bridge and into the yards of North St. Louis at first light.

The Seventh lead section special paused again, overlong this time because of the threatened failure of a drawbar on one of the lead cars; also, the trainmen were adding more Pullmans for the two companies of the second battalion that had been left in the old tourist cars.  The boys awoke in poor, discouraged, unwashed moods and were stretching, banging the upper berths back to their daytime position, clearing the benches and aisle of debris and clothing, and generally complaining of the wait--just sitting there as the sun began the baking of the roof--when the cars finally careened into motion again into the depot, where the switch to the new Pullmans for companies E and F was to take place.

      "How you doin'?" Hal asked Herbie, who'd slept in his choice, left-sided fetal curl at Hal's feet as they'd shared a lower berth, which was manageable and fair-minded given the number of boys who'd balked at sharing.

      "I'm hungry."  Herbie studied the folds on his khaki trousers

      "Got that right," said Steers from his extended sleep on a day bench.

      "I can smell coffee," said Hutton.

      "So can I," said Ellis, to which the other teaspoon-sized, piously attentive, surprisingly resilient and game Knickerbocker Grays agreed readily: Pennypacker, Tripp, and a fellow so fresh-faced he looked about ten years old and who penciled everything he heard in a reporter's notebook, Fiske Burroughs, the IVth, from West Ninetieth Street and Newburgh, a not-so-secret nephew of the regimental commander.

      "Fat-arsed weak-backed officers, I'm sure they've got theirs," said Bull Steers.

      "Here's Bull 'Wobblies' again," mocked Kid Wendt.

      "Like shit I'd wait for those ass-kissin' boys," explained Steers

      "We've got a sound stove, which is more'n we had in the other car," Hal argued, ignoring the Steers and Wendt tussle, only partially in jest, with some bite, over the IWW, as 'way too early in the morning for sense.  "We lack kindling," said Hal, as Wendt had been unable to find anything at Indianapolis to burn in the old stoves. "If we can find something to burn, then what we need is coffee beans to grind.  We could use a coffee pot, I suppose."

      "And a chef--I can handle it in a pinch," said Lefferts Hutton, "and soft-boiled eggs, and anchovy toast with eggs, scalloped eggs for you, Herbie--you beat up the eggs to a froth, pour them evenly on a bed of ham, season with onion and parsley--and baked salmon with cream sauce, a spinach pie . . ." Hutton recited from his summertime menu at Bar Harbor, "and sausages, about this high, three dozen flapjacks, make those blueberry flapjacks, and maple syrup."

      They also lacked a sleeping car porter; one appeared in due course for the first time, following a trail of other Pullman porters who had come on at Indianapolis with the change of cars.  The black-faced line of porters was in turn followed by a parade of pink-faced, unshaven mess sergeants and never-shaved privates bearing trays, plates, sacks, pails; they had been sent through the cars to fetch what breakfast supplies existed in the rations car now three cars back from Hal's car--back behind the new cars for E and F company.

      "More beans and strawberry jam, boys, whatch'a think?"

      "We gave the hash to the goat--and he gave it back!"

      The food provided on the trip had been so irresponsibly unfit--canned beans and hardtack after Harrisburg, boiled old coffee outside of Altoona, cold hash and bread across the Ohio state line at Mingo Junction, warm old boiled coffee at Columbus, strawberry jam and bread at Indianapolis with coffee too viscous and bowel-destroying to risk--that without the cakes and cookies from the New York hotels and Knickerbocker Greys's family kitchens, without the sandwiches, fruit and treats at Harrisburg, they would now be sinking from starvation as well as a new outbreak of dehydration and diarrhea in the car.

      "Who's got the coffee?" demanded Steers, removing his campaign hat from his stubbly, cinder and smoke-stained, red-eyed face.  "That's real coffee!  I can smell it.  Roasted beans!"

       The porter for their car, a stout Negro, gray through his whiskers, no hair on his pate, huge hands absent two fingers, walked like a rocking horse down the aisle, looking over how the boys had treated themselves and his equipment last night; at the toilet, now freshly scoured under Hal's command of the duty roster, the porter stood by with a sagging, troubled posture; he twisted his hands together.  He reached down to help Ellis and Pennybacker straighten their bench seat.  He answered questions from Fiske Burroughs, who wrote down his exact words.

      "Can you give us a moment of advice?" Hal spoke up to the porter.

      "They already told me I was going to be court-martialed.  And shot."

      "What's that?"

      The porter, whose name was Maurice Bell, from New Orleans, told them that "the General" had accused the sleeping car porters of shirking their duty and violating their oath of allegiance to the United States of America because he'd discovered Bell and a number of the other porters--perhaps all the porters--in a card game in an unoccupied compartment of the third Pullman car.  "We told him that our night's not to hector the passengers."  Bell modulated his heavily-laden, Louisiana basso-profundo voice to a measured baritone with sharp consonants equivalent to that of the fellow he'd encountered, "If you don't get busy around these cars, says he, you'll be held as military prisoners, court-martialed and shot."

      Lefferts Hutton asked, "Who said shot?"

      Bell pointed to the sleeve, and made the stripes of a red brassard indicating a first sergeant.  "No, no, the General, we'n told him, we didn't take no oath of allegiance.  We left your baggage alone, right where you put it."

      "What rubbish," said Hutton.  Bull Steers and Kid Wendt haw-hawed.

Hal spoke candidly to Bell, who was not confident he'd not been mocked before, or wasn't being mocked now: "You're in our car, and no one's gonna bother you.  Battalion sergeants don't come back here, and our first sergeant does what we tell him to do, and we don't have a mess sergeant, and we haven't seen our platoon sergeant since Richmond.  We're in need of kindling, and coffee beans, and maybe a stove, and maybe some genuine food.  What do you say, Mr. Bell?"

"You're askin' this boy?" Wendt teased.  "He's to be executed in Texas."

"That will be the end of that talk, Mr. Wendt," said Hal.

"Oh, well, so you say," Kid Wendt returned clumsily.

"I do," said Hal.  He set his face up into Bell's.  Hal waited for Bell to judge him.  Herbie leaned close to hear Bell's response.  Herbie's crooked, toothy, chubby cheeked and ravenous smile was what Bell studied.

"And we can pay," Hal pronounced in a timely fashion, telling Bull Steers, Kid Wendt and Lef Hutton to collect a dollar from each man who could pay in the car.

Mr. Bell had a deal to say for cash money, lovely five dollar bills and silver dollars, and a great deal of common sense to add for no charge.  As the special regained its forward motion in the bottomless heat of the morning, snaking and jerking through the yards and onto the switches that directed it into the train shed, Mr. Bell had so much to say that he was soon Hal's mess sergeant.  Before they departed the St. Louis depot, just before 7 am, Mr. Bell brought them three pounds of coffee beans he'd sent a runner for from the depot; and when they picked up speed again, Bell showed them a locked box of kindling wood in the porters compartment and provided not one but three coffee pots and a half dozen mugs.  Soon, fresh Costa Rican coffee beans, arriving daily from New Orleans -- with high fine acidity, commented Emmons Ellis as he ground them in a porcelain bowl - and with a body and an aroma that made the car into a coffee house when boiling water was poured over them.  The coffee was son ready to be consumed along with the unpopular strawberry jam for fresh bread that Mr. Bell had ordered and paid for to be delivered from the depot mess - along with a dozen hard-boiled eggs and a pair of soft-boiled for Herbie.  This sudden feast satisfied their worst peckishness as the special began again to wend its way through the dozens of tracks outside of the depot, 740 am, and to find the open signal for the Katy road - the mighty Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad that would carry it to west to Sedalia, then southwest to Oklahoma onto the San Antonio road.  At least the open windows brought a musky corn-rich boiled breeze through the car.  The estimate was that it was over one hundred degrees out there, as flaming hostile a day as imaginable where you can still see oak trees, cornfields, rivers and ponds.   Presently, the locomotive slowed at a crossroads of spare, wind-battered buildings and a sidetrack with a yard, for watering and coaling, and for the officers Pullmans to be stocked with ice.   Mr. Bell was on the spot with information about where to send runners for fresh supplies from the crossroads.  This vanquished looking collection of shacks was a town named Mokane.  The companies were turned out of the cars for their first organized stretching ad exercising since New York.  Word came from the front cars that it was Colonel Fiske's toweringly brainy notion, supported by his delirious staff officers, that the platoons should conduct a brisk walk in cadence over the rolling terrain of Mokane - a farming village otherwise famous, they were told repeatedly, for being the home of the bandits the Younger brothers.  The heat made the roasted grass and bushes sing with crickets and a peculiar sizzling.   The sleep-deprived Ahern requested that Headquarters Company assemble by its two platoons, and that the platoons close up to form a phalanx of four across, fifteen deep.   Van Santvoord asked them, "Are you ready?  Count off?"

Hal told Herbie and his handful, "Mind your pace!  Speak up if you start to feel weak!"

Thirty minutes later, Colonel Fisk and his professorial staff redoubled their genius in how to train men in a heat wave and ordered double time to return to the cars.  The tennis star regimental sergeant, Smith, looked over his charges - the officers were not along to interfere with their own precocious inandations -- and barked a hoarse request to the battalions.  At the top of a rise, when they could see the town swimming hole, and the chugging, watering Sante Fe locomotive, under a cloudless aquamarine with only a pale humpbacked moon to mar the sizzling canvas, unlucky and uncomplaining Pennypacker collapsed as if he'd been clubbed and his pal Fiske Burroughs tripped over him.  Hal heard the crash of the rifles on the concrete like dust and halted the unit by calling to Ahern and Van Santvoord, "Man down!"  Before Ahern could turn back to help the flummoxed Van Santvoord, two more boys collapsed with trembling, dry heaving.  Ahern reached Pennypacker before he too dumbly sank into a sitting position in the dust, his docile fair face swollen scarlet from heat prostration.  Headquarters Company, at the rear of the columns, broke ranks in confusion; in moments it was not alone leveled on the roadside, joined by the whole khaki line of six hundred that was breaking down as if a wind was snapping off sunflowers.  "Water!"  "Doctor!"  The sounds of wretching were part of the epidemic, along with the clatter of packs and Springfields tossed, hoarse voices begging assistance, and always a low, gasping heaving as the boys bent over the theirs and suffered.  Ahern and Van Santvoord stood by in dumb puzzlement.  Hal could not wait the longer for such simpletons, and started barking orders to get the collapsed boys to the car; and by the time Hal was satisfied with the arrangements onboard, Bell had arrived with recruits of eleven local Negro children delivering boxes of fruit, cheese, fresh milk and cream, cans of tomatoes, beets, fourteen loaves of bread and a half dozen two-day old molasses, rhubarb green apple, fried peach, amber and jelly pies and a box of poor man's pudding sweet potato pudding, peach pudding.  Hal had also sent out a well-financed Kid Wendt with assistants to join the other squads search the town for edibles; and the chief success of the last half hour was to get abundant ice into their Pullman and set Herbie and Hutton in charge of the ice cream making.

Before departing, Hal did experience an uncomfortable long moment, while waiting for his last foraging team to return with fruit from Mr. Bell's friends - "what Wendt insisted upon shouting out was "the Coffeeville of Mokane" and calling it out to Mr. Bell and the other porters - when word came via shouts from knot of boys up ahead that there was trouble at the swimming hole. 

            "Drowned," was what Hal heard faintly, and when he looked around, he was taken with the sudden possibility that Herbie had gone off with Hutton to find more cream from the town.  "Drowned in six feet," he heard again.  Hal felt the chill of terror as he launched himself off the platform to the dust, calling, "Who?" with a dry mouth until he stopped himself and recovered his strength.  Herbie was rocking up the bank under the weight of a barrel of ice, a grin as large as the sun on his beautiful, shining, sweaty face.

Mr. Maurice Bell of New Orleans provided more supplies at the shorter stops through the burning day, at Sedalia, at Parsons and then, across the Oklahoma State line as the night cooled them down, at Vinita in Indian Territory, where they could see shrunken Cherokees or Creeks or Choctaws, no one could tell, sleeping on the platforms.  On through the moonlit Big Cabin, Adair, Prior Creek, Chouteau, Ft. Gibson, across the Arkansas River to Muskogee, across the Canadian River to a daybreak stop for water, coal and ice at McAlister, where they were permitted off the train for another exercise, though under a cloudy sky, without either the heat or the cadence marching.  McAllister was also the first time the regiment had seen Mexicans in number, more than one hundred and fifty soot-stained, axe-handle sized Mexican track laborers standing silently in the yard.  The regiment tossed cigarettes to their raised hands, with mocking cries from the battalions of  "How do you fight off their fleas?" and "They must've washed last year!"  On McAllister's East Choctaw Street, where there were more dogs and mules than people, Hal and his platoon paused with others to listen to an ancient, greasy drover who said he was P.F. Sutton, and that his regiment, the 52^nd Illinois, had been at Culpepper Courthouse in Virginia alongside the 7^th.

"Couldn't have been this 7^th," Emmons Ellis returned.

"I was at Gettysburg," Sutton returned as proof of his fifty-one year old recollection.  "The 7^th weren't at Gettysburg.  P.F Sutton was!  P.F. Sutton remembers!"

The uncanny billowing white clouds to the south extended across the unending horizon and soon transformed into layered bands of leaden blue below and a brighter white band above, topped by gray, seamless pile of rain-laden storm clouds.  Sudden, crushing, short-lived downpours struck the cars twice as they rolled at thirty-five miles per hour through the Choctaw Nation, the soggy Limestone Gap, Atoka, Caney, Caddo, Durant, Colbert, and then the heavens poured a cascade on the roadbed as they crossed the surging Red River into Texas and stopped at Denison for a walk in a now drenched day.  Hal was feeling confident of his car: enroute the officers had walked through again for an inspection of the men and equipment, each of the privates answering about his rifle correctly, all gear stowed neatly, the aisles uncluttered, swept.  Also, Hal used the pool of ready money to pay Bell to bring back something the could heat for supper; and the porter returned from a Denison hotel with a sixteen pound cured beef ham blanketed with ground black pepper mixed in a molasses paste.  "Slice it thin, sir!"  Bell admonished.  "Cut across the grain.  Don't need to broil, or frizzle.  Just slice and eat raw!"

 At Dallas, late in the gray daylight, the gentlemen of the Chamber of Commerce, dressed in their Palm Beach whites, greeted the officers on the platform while Hal directed his people to get the berths down for a wet night.  The special chugged again past the oil lamps of Hutchins, Palmer... then - Hal nodding off at the rhythmic rattle of the wheels and the splashing rain on the windows  -- Hammond, Calvert and Hearne....  then again discord awoke Hal, and he found Maurice Bell and several other porters, solemn, felicitous, neatly uniformed and broad men like Bell, stepping over supplies and bringing along a tall Negro private, introducing him as J.L. Cox, of Troop K, Tenth Cavalry, who had missed out on the gunfight the week before at Carrizal because he'd been on furlough.

"Stowaway, the General called him," said Bell, explaining in adoring gesticulations that Cox had sneaked on the train at Dallas.  "No, sir, Private Cox's  headin' back to troop.  General says we can feed him, and you got the best table, Mr. Coolidge.  Any smoked ham left?  Private Cox, made his mouth water, when I tell him."

"Hey, now, shit."  Wendt stirred in his sleep and spied the black faces.

Steers awoke, thirsty, fractious, crude:  "What're you at with the darkies, Hal Coolidge?"

Hal measured the other boys staring from their berths or seats at the porters and tall, hungry Cox.  On the one hand, the Knickerbocker Grays were too religiously civil and effortlessly well-mannered, too archly secretive in their prejudices, to speak up that they didn't want a delegation of Negroes in their car; they were accustomed to servants, however dark servants were not preferred in New York, not this close to the young gentlemen's pockets and weapons.  The collegians did reveal their opinion in sighs and disapproving glances, turning over in their sleep, sniffing, groaning.  On the other hand, Hal wanted information about the border.  It was an economic equation to Hal, who was a matter of fact, Yankee Doodle plain spoken, practical thinker.   The advantage to Hal was immediate, unparalleled and most of all, profitable.  The disadvantage was negligible and fleeting.

Hal told Bell, "Yes." 

At full light, the rain stopped, through Austin and a brief stop for and into the stock yards at San Antonio, several acres of steers stamping in the wet dust, the special was passed onto the road for the St. Louis, Texas and Brownville Railroad to the border; and there was a long delay as they were watered and iced for the last leg.  Also, the news came through the cars that they were directed not to the Brownsville depot, but rather to another, smaller town to the west of Brownsville, along the Rio Grande river - a place called McAllen.

"McAllen is where we're headed, you know of it?" Hal asked the now well served, much relaxed Cox, seated on a bench with the layout of breakfast around him.  Hal had ordered Cox to sit in such a way that everyone could hear his remarks.  And once they'd returned the car to acceptable tidiness, brewed coffee, divided the last of the pies, puddings, and fruit, jam and bread, and the remains of the ham, the Knickerbocker Greys had suspended their disregard, temper and sullen disgust for the company of Negroes and crowded close to overhear Private James Cox for an interview of polite perspicuity while everyone shared what was left and ate with their fingers. 

"Sure, do.  Border town.  Not much.  Depot.  Telephone. Mostly a passin' through place. And now it got da New York National Guard."  Cox was long legged and short-spoken.  The porters idolized him, as the Tenth Cavalry was a famous all-colored regiment, a fifty-year reputation as Buffalo Soldiers; and the Tenth Cavalry was now a sensational part of the news because it had been cut up badly by a Mexican Federales machine gun ten days before at the Mexican mesa village named Carrizal.  Cox had missed the Carrizal gunfight, and was just returned from a twenty-day furlough.  He'd boarded the special to save himself the fare to Brownsville.   He took another cigarette from Fiske Burroughs, who was recording every word in his notebook.

"What about the Mexican Army - the Federales - are they near McAllen?" asked Lefferts Hutton.

Cox shook his head, negative.  "Only Mex' near Brownsville and the like is diggers and the like.  Y'know, campesinos, evil lookin' dirty faced rattlesnakes who work for eats."

"Why are they putting us there?" Hutton asked.

"You boys start askin' why da Army does what it does...well...."  Cox shrugged to the satisfied laughter of the four porters in the aisle.

"Can you tell us about Carrizal?" asked Lefferts Hutton, widening his eyes.

"Weren't dere," said Cox.

"What's a nigger gonna know?" muttered Wendt loudly.

"What does your rude inquiry accomplish, Mr. Wendt?" asked Burroughs.  "I ask in seriousness.  All any of us can know of Carrizal is what we have read in the newspaper reports in the last week.   To expect Mr. Cox to know more is to expect the total supernatural."

"It accomplishes, shithead, what I say," growled Kid Wendt.

Hal leaned forward and allowed his dark eyes to aim at Wendt.  Hal waited for Wendt to look away, and when he did, Hal whispered, "O.K."

Steers kicked Wendt hard enough to make him spill his coffee mug.  "Shut yer hole and listen to them that can read, Kid."

Cox chewed and added to Burroughs,  "What I hear we got sent up at a machine gun,"

"Carrizal is a village in the high desert in Chihuahua Province," began Fiske Burroughs from his notes, "about three hundred miles to the northwest from here.  Mountainous plateau of ravines, naked bounders, dried run-offs, narrow, shallow streams they call rivers, a sense of flatness because everything is twelve hundred feet high.  It's called a mesa.  Where Pershing and the expedition have been chasing Villa.  The newspaper accounts," continued Fiske Burroughs with a brisk, confident tone, "which are decidedly incomplete, not researched in the field, certainly not informed by more than the surviving, available American officers, say that General Pershing learned that Villa could be captured at Carrizal.   A week ago, Wednesday, the twenty-first.  Two undermanned troop, C and K, of the Tenth Cavalry, Colored, about eighty-four men, with three officers, arrived at the outskirts of Carrizal before dawn, and formed up around 630 in the morning in an open field, southeast of the town.  Captain Boyd of the Tenth parleyed with the Federales commander and, according to Captain Morey, the surviving officer's account to generals Pershing and Funston, written while Morey was hiding from the Mexicans later that same day, Captain Boyd received permission to enter the town.  The Mexican force is said to have been as large as seven hundred men, with a machine gun.  Boyd, for unexplained cause, was fearful of an ambush.  Leaving his horses, he formed up his attack on foot and advanced to within three hundred yards of the Mexican line, when the shooting started.   A running gunfight continued for over and hour.  The Federales flanked the Americans and chased off their horses.  After nine o'clock in the morning, K troop started to fall back, then C Troop.  The troopers fled all day and into the night, when Eleventh Cavalry found stragglers.  Many dead and wounded.  Captain Morey survived by walking all night and finding a mud hole, then an abandoned campsite for food.  The Mexicans captured two dozen of the Tenth."

"What happened to Boyd?" asked Lefferts Hutton.

"Reported dead," said Burroughs.  "Lieutenant Adair is also reported dead.  The first report said that the Mexicans killed them specially, after the death of their commander, Gomez."

"Shit," said Steers.

  Burroughs asked Cox, "Do you know any of the names of the dead enlisted men, or the prisoners?"

"Knows 'em, right," Cox replied, and stopped talking.

"Who shot first?" Hal asked; he watched the faces of the boys; they were both astonished and confused that this man, Cox, could easily have been dead out there in the Mexican dust - that it was a peculiar fate that he'd been spared.

"That's the question," said Steers, "hey, Kid?"

"First fist, aye," said Wendt.

Cox shrugged and ate from the remains on his lap of the cold amber pie, sweet potato pudding, mush bread, and apple custard.  Hal saw Cox did not place significance at the cant remarks of Irishmen; Hal saw he didn't seem to care at all at who shot first; Hal saw that Co was hungry and enjoying his luck.

Fisk Burroughs responded, "According to Captain Morey, the Federales opened fire.  The Federales say they were attacked.  Perhaps.  Captain Morey says that Boyd expected the Mexicans to flee.  There's a story that says Villa was present in the hills nearby and watched the gunfight between his adversaries and laughed."

Hutton asked, "You believe that?"

"I report what I read in the newspapers," said Burroughs, writing the more.

"What about you, Private Cox?" Hutton asked Cox.

Cox shrugged,  "Maybe dat Villa, he's a ghost.  We chasin' him since March, and what we found is nuttin.'  Like a ghost, nuttin'."

"The last reliable report of Villa," said Fiske Burroughs, "is that he was wounded in a gunfight, by one of his own people, and that he's either recuperating or dying."

Mention of Villa, the florid, notorious, cinematic, spectacularly politically astute General Pancho Villa, patriot, candidate, soldier, horseman, bandit, legend, ignited general comment in many voices, questions about Villa's whereabouts, remarks about the likelihood that Villa was long deceased and that General Pershing was chasing a legend, disputes as to the reliability of the Carranza government that had made Villa an outlaw after treating with him as an ally, the profound, enervating mystery of Mexican politics, why it was called "sick," why the United States Army could not subdue an ill-armed, unfed, vastly outnumbered gang - all this, in addition to thoughts about food, the heat, and how long till they reached McAllen, all this was eventually supplanted by just one speaker, the scholarly, judicious, and decidedly over-educated, over-thoughtful Lefferts Hutton, who was explaining himself to Hal and Herbie but was eventually addressing the whole audience.   Hutton's speech began soft, serene, and then took on the cautious, sincere sound of a much older, wiser man, a graybeard of his father's generation, who was accustomed to the irony of history: "I don't believe Villa was anywhere near Carrizal, and that sort of rumor is self-important talk, to make excuses for us and to vilify the Mexicans," said Hutton.  "It's all very well after the fact to say that you had information that Villa was here or there, yet this is not the first time General Pershing has sent elements of his Punitive Force into a town, and it's not the first, or tenth time, that our cavalry has come across the Federales.  But it is the first time that two allies have found a six hour running gun battle, without any attempt to call a ceasefire, just banging away at each other, seeing the others uniforms and flags.   I think it was a failure of command on both sides.  I think the American officers owe explanations for why they forced the confrontation, when they could see the opposition was Federales.  And the Mexican officers, inexcusable, to open fire on the American cavalry, on the American flag.  And for this, I think President Wilson finds himself in a quandary."

"If that means he's stuck his face in the wrong saloon- haw haw!" roared Wendt.

"It means," continued Hutton softly, "that the President sent us to the border, and to the brink of a war with Mexico, because of a gunfight between friends.  Carrizal, the disaster and fright at Carrizal, the headlines about Carrizal, that's why we got the rush to get on the cars and come out here.  Carrizal, and Carrizal alone was the straw.  The United States and Mexico agree that Villa is a blackguard and a nuisance - not a profound nuisance, not a weighty danger, just a nuisance, like bad weather, or a bad crop.  The United States and Mexico agree that there is nothing to fight over.  The United States and Mexico agree that in such a war, the United States will win and Mexico will lose, just as has happened before.  And what is to be discovered?  Not one thing.  The President knows that to attack Mexico is a brutal, impulsive, thoughtless thing of itself.  Like attacking a stupid old cur.  What do you gain?  Mexico can't resist a month.  Our Navy will close Tampico and Vera Cruz.  Our Army will march straight to Mexico City.  Three months, four.  And the President will have chased the ancient, inept Carranza, smashed the poorly equipped Federales, and won a small, small war.  No glory, no meaning.  I won't say dishonorable.  Honor doesn't enter the story."

The boys studied pink faced Lefferts Hutton to see if he would break the spell; he looked like them, yet he spoke like an old man, some concatenation of a rueful scholar, a horny handed diplomat, an over delicate preacher.  Hutton gently removed his eyeglasses to clean, then, to mop his eye sockets and brow from the perspiration.  For a moment in his anxious, ruminative pose, he appeared as sober and burdened as the politicians he measured, a baby-faced Wilson, a beardless Hughes; and he then smiled at his own thoughts and looked to Hal with pleasant, felicitous curiosity.

"What do you think?" Hutton asked.

Hal's thoughts were matter of fact and of the moment.  He glanced out the window to a sudden corkscrew of dust that lifted from the wasteland to the east and scooped a gigantic handful of fine powder over the cars, into the aisles, so that Hal could taste Texas.  "Carrizal is faraway to the west in Mexico and done with, and what I heard from that is that it is dangerous to make a wrong move in Mexico.   This place McAllen is what I care about, and it's in Texas, and we're not likely to see Mexico for a long while - a hot, dull long while.  There sounds as much chance as us marching into Mexico as there is those Federales marching on Texas.   Private Cox, you say it's a border town, and it doesn't have an Army post or anything like.  This means it is wide open to what's coming.  We do have a prime advantage.  We're the front end of a long, long train - the 71^st, the 14^th and 12^th, the 47^th, the cavalry and artillery, and eventually the 69^th, and that's just the New York regiments -- that's going to make McAllen the hungriest, ornieriest, best armed and best supplied town from here to El Paso; and we're good to get into town first.  We're going to have a few hours to look over the terrain, to identify and secure the best spot we can, to get up our pyramidals, to mark our wells, and most of all to make certain we have food can eat, plenty of it."

"And smokes!" said Steers.

"Our business," continued Hal, "is to fix it in such a way that the other enterprising boys coming behind us don't have an opportunity to elbow us aside.  We labor together, we'll hold together.  Four hours to McAllen, they say.  The baggage train is long since arrived there and await us to get it unloaded.  Unloading that baggage train is ours to get to quick, with spirit, with plans.  We get to our big equipment fast as we can - we lay claim to it right away.  Bull and I know the trainman with our equipment -" Bull Steers issued unsurprising Fulton Street vulgarities about the trainman - "... and he's available," Hal continued talking over Steers, "to our persuasion and a little cash too, to get our hands on the good cars quick.    Everyone get his kit together now so you're ready to go as soon as the cars stop.  Whatever McAllen is, they're likely to put us outside of town on land that no one much wants, on land the Army can just lay claim to.  Scrub land, with water nearby.  This is likely to be a land grab for us, and that lot,"- he meant the First and Second Battalions in the front cars  - "...that lot will bellow that they get handed the best spot because they're fighting companies.  No.  They can have what they want.   But not before us.  We're going to claim the best piece of Texas we can reach.  And we don't give up what we claim."

Exuberant, relieved comments of agreement, unhesitating support, fretful acknowledgement that there wasn't any leadership to wait on in the company or the regiment, measured opinions of the inexplicable failure of the officers to communicate, to plan, to contribute in any way to the fundamental welfare of the regiment, all this followed Hal's speech as applause follows an opening act.   Ever afterward, this was known in the company as the "Hal takes charge speech." This was a self-electing lot of young men, accustomed to privileges, and they laid hold to the advantage of Hal Coolidge's pragmatic, tool-built leadership: Hutton, Burroughs, Pennypacker, Tripp and more of the Knickerbocker Greys in the car joined in, boys of family prestige, unshakeable prospects, potent parenting, reliable temperament - so many joined in that it was more than a squad's worth, was perhaps nearly a platoon's worth, was quickly the whole of the Pullman, every boy inquiring genteelly if they too were to join the rush to the baggage train and the land rush to camp.

Hal told Steers, "We take as many as we can.  You round up the working men."

Steers heard Hal's meaning and cursed, squirmed and resisted, but he did not refuse.  "What horseshit," Steers tried.

"Right?" asked Hal.

"All right, all right," from Steers, lighting up; he was smoking Fatima, and most gleefully, as it was a fashionable brand he could easily bum from the college boys.  "S'long's I get my pick wi' them senoritas."

Later, chugging past the prominent three and four story brick-made buildings and spreading stockyards, backed up rolling stock, gape-mouthed soldiers and muck-sweated Mexican work gangs at Brownsville - the Army headquarters for the defense of the border as far Rio Grande City -- then steadily at a trot up the gradual incline of the river valley, through tiny Mercedes, through tiny Pharr, the train slowed to a crawl as it approached McAllen on a flat yellow brown.  McAllen was flatter than flat, so flat that you could see the curvature of the earth; and it was already a khaki colored landscape of mesquite shrubs, corn and vegetable fields close to muddy canals, chewed up livestock, broken posts, trash piles of ties, rocks, vehicle parts, and up there a where the tracks divided into two spurs, a starkly plain stucco and tile-roofed, wind battered depot building in the middle of a crapulous line of plank-built and rain rotted platform.  All this colorless flatness was bathed in a hot wind and a gigantic sun that by noontime had steamed off the damp from a surprising early morning downpour - it hadn't much rained in fourteen months -- and was throwing off white rollers of dust from the ceaseless sea of dust that was the South Texas, Lower Rio Grande border.

Hal turned from eating dust at the window, checked his mental list of items to accomplish, and then told Herbie, "O.K, you ready, you know I'm going to take charge for us, the way Ma would like, good for you?"

Herbie smiled slowly as he repeated himself twice with the fresh glee of their days in New York City, with the sturdy, vibrant assurance of their boyhood together on the Ossining hills.  "Yeah, Hal, Ma would like it."  Herbie's face was a round beam of chubby, beardless cheerfulness, the forever child ready for a new day at play.

Hal, standing, stretching, gesturing in the easy, commanding, scrupulous, muscular way he'd learned in the garages he'd worked, the posture of a foreman, told the boys in the car, "Ready, ready, this is our work now," and then walked forward in the rocking, banging, dust-choked and foul-smelling cars to find the company first sergeant.

"I've thought about this 'sergeant' rank.  For me and Bull Steers."

Ahern rubbed and picked at his face, white, salt-caked, and only half alert.  He hesitated to reply; he spoke frailly,  "You will do it?

"I pick my corporals.  Bull Steers picks his.  You take what we don't."

"Good, good, thank you, good."

"You give us the hostlers, ironsmiths, any carpenters, plumbers we can find.  You also give me the boys who want to join us."  Hal named ten names, starting with the Grays: Hutton and Burroughs, Pennypacker and Tripp.  "We handle the wagons, the mounts for the officers, the two automobiles.  The boys don't figure on the typing and the keeping of books."

Ahern protested, "What do I do for typists and stenographers?"

"They want to learn about the teams and the automobile engines."

"If I have enough who can type."

"I can understand this as a yes, right?"

Ahern was glum, resigned.  "It's a yes.  Yes.  Please, yes."

Hal wasn't finished: he needed to secure access to food for the boys and supplies and parts and fuel for his autos.  "Who's mess sergeant?"
            "Since you're taking platoon, I'll name Jamie Van Santvoord."

Van Santvoord was still dozing in his seat ahead, if that could be called sleep: he was suffering from two days of dehydration, malnutrition, unrelieved exhaustion: there was also a fever and diarrhea going through the cars which overwhelmed the toilets and made the boys insensate to their own stench and indifferent to care.

"And who's quartermaster sergeant?"

"I don't have one.  Want that job, too?" Though weakened like Van Santvoord and disconsolate about his own ability, Ahern tried his version of his father the banker's salesmanship.  "You know the deputy quartermaster for the regiment, I'm sure.   He gave us the autos you're in charge of."

"David Silver?"

"That's him."  Ahern sighed and tried smirking.  "The Jewish cavalry, they call it.  No one wants the job.  You certain you don't?"

Cautious, conservative, step at a time Hal stated, "I want to take care of my boys."

The cars jolted to a cracking, scraping halt.  Whistles, gritty calls, mule teams banging alongside, a general groan and retching from the cars, and what also sounded like gunshots from the nearby dust-coated, window-shuttered, half empty and formally prosperous cotton and horse town of McAllen - a line of similar failed, mostly vacant frontier towns that had lost everything of the future with the triumph of the Boll Weevil -- quickly filled the moment with questions.  Ahern started to stand, and slipped back into his bench; he was thinner and his uniform was stained; he rallied his gentleman's sense of a bargain. "Shake on it?"

            Hal, not a ruminative or reluctant young man, had a vision of himself as a leader, and he aimed to be paid for it; Hal asked bluntly and loudly, "What's quartermaster sergeant pay?"