Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories

								

beside him and there, panting for breath after his long run, and with
one ear hanging limp and bloody, cowered Corporal. Phelan's hands were
not at his disposal, but even if they had been it is doubtful if he
would have denied Corp the joy for once of kissing him.
Through the rest of the night the heavy cars rumbled over the rails, and
the men took turn about sleeping and guarding the prisoner. Only once
did Phelan venture another question:
"Say, you sports, you don't mind telling me where you are taking me, do
you?"
"Listen at his gaff!" said one. "He'll know all right when he gets to
Nashville."
Phelan sent such a radiant smile into the darkness that it threatened
to reveal itself. Then he slipped his encircled wrists about Corporal's
body and giving him a squeeze whispered:
"It's better'n the bumpers, Corp."
At the Penitentiary next day there was consternation and dismay when
instead of the desperate criminal, who two days before had scaled the
walls and dropped to freedom, an innocent little Irishman was presented,
whose only offense apparently was in having donned, temporarily, the
garb of crime.
As the investigation proceeded, Phelan found it expedient, to become
excessively indignant. That an American citizen, strolling harmlessly
through the fields of a summer evening, and being caught in a shower,
should attempt to dry his clothes in an unused shed, and find himself
attacked and bound, and hurried away without his belongings to a distant
city, was an inconceivable outrage. If a shadow of doubt remained as to
his identity, a score of prominent gentlemen in the city would be able
to identify him. He named them, and added that he was totally unable to
hazard a guess as to what form their resentment of his treatment would
assume.
The authorities looked grave. Could Mr. Harrihan remember just what
articles he had left behind? Mr. Harrihan could. A suit of clothes, a
pair of shoes, a hat, a toilet set, and a small sum of money; "the loss
of which," added Phelan with a fine air of indifference, "are as nothing
compared to the indignity offered to my person."
Would the gentleman be satisfied if the cost of these articles, together
with the railroad fare back to Lebanon Junction be paid him? The
gentleman, after an injured pause, announced that he would.
And thus it was that Mr. Phelan Harrihan, in immaculate raiment,
presented himself at the Sixth Annual Reunion of the Alpha Delta
fraternity and, with a complacent smile encircling a ten-cent cigar, won
fresh laurels by recounting, with many adornments, the adventures of the
previous night.

"POP"

The gloomy corridor in the big Baltimore hospital was still and deserted
save for a nurse who sat at a flat-topped desk under a green lamp
mechanically transferring figures from one chart to another. It was the
period of quiet that usually precedes the first restless stirring of the
sick at the breaking of dawn. The silence was intense as only a silence