Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories

								

and shoes and sending a dashing cascade down Corporal's oblique profile.
"Float on your back, Corp, and pull for the shore!" laughed Phelan as he
landed with a spring under the dilapidated shed. "Cheer up, old pard;
you look as if all your past misdeeds had come before you in your
drowning hour."
Corporal, shivering and unhappy, crept under cover, and dumbly demanded
of Phelan what he intended to do about it.
"Light a blaze, sure," said Phelan, "and linger here in the air of the
tropics till the midnight freight comes along."
Scraping together the old wood and débris in the rear of the shed, and
extricating with some difficulty a small tin match-box from his
saturated clothes, he knelt before the pile and used all of his
persuasive powers to induce it to ignite.
At the first feeble blaze Corporal's spirits rose so promptly that he
had to be restrained.
"Easy there! Corp," cautioned Phelan. "A fire's like a woman, you can't
be sure of it too soon. And, dog alive, stop wagging your tail, don't
you see it makes a draft?"
The fire capriciously would, then it wouldn't. A tiny flame played
tantalizingly along the top of a stick only to go sullenly out when it
reached the end. Match after match was sacrificed to the cause, but at
last, down deep under the surface, there was a steady, reassuring,
cheerful crackle that made Phelan sit back on his heels, and remark
complacently:
"They most generally come around, in the end!"
In five minutes the fire was burning bright, Corporal was dreaming of
meaty bones in far fence corners, and Phelan, less free from the
incumbrances of civilization, was divesting himself of his rain-soaked
garments.
From one of the innumerable pockets of his old cutaway coat he took a
comb and brush and clothes-brush, and carefully deposited them before
the fire. Then from around his neck he removed a small leather case,
hung by a string and holding a razor. His treasured toilet articles thus
being cared for, he turned his attention to the contents of his dripping
bundle. A suit of underwear and a battered old copy of Eli Perkins were
ruefully examined, and spread out to dry.
The fire, while it lasted, was doing admirable service, but the wood
supply was limited, and Phelan saw that he must take immediate advantage
of the heat. How to dry the underwear which he wore was the question
which puzzled him, and he wrestled with it for several moments before an
inspiration came.
"I'll borrow some duds from the scarecrow!" he said half aloud, and
went forth immediately to execute his idea.
The rain had ceased, but the fields were still afloat, and Phelan waded
ankle deep through the slush grass, to where the scarecrow raised his
threatening arms against the twilight sky.
"Beggars and borrowers shouldn't be choosers," said Phelan, as he
divested the figure of its ragged trousers and coat, "but I have a
strong feeling in my mind that these habiliments ain't going to become