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“I know, I know, Sergeant,” interrupts the perplexed and worried young captain, a clever young dandy bright enough to be willing to take wisdom without shoulder straps; “I’ve been to the colonel; he agrees with me, and he’s been to Major Green, and that’s all comes of it. I don’t see what I can do further, if I did–“

“Begging your pardon, Captain, the men will be falling sick soon and dying. They’re weakened by the climate and being fretted, expecting always to git off and never going.”

“But what can I do? Oh, speak out, we’re off here alone. Have you any idea?”

“Well, sir, if you was my captain in the old –th, you’d say to the colonel, ‘Colonel, I’ve remonstrated and remonstrated. Now I’m desperate. I’m desperate,’ says you. ‘If there ain’t something done to-morrow I’m going to march my company out and find a new camp, and you kin court-martial me if you please. I’d rather stand a court-martial than see my men die!’ He’d talk real pleasant at first, so as to git in all his facts, and then he’d blaze away. And he’d do it, too, if they didn’t listen.”

The captain gave the sergeant a keen glance. “And that’s your notion of discipline?” said he.

“There’s a newspaper fellow asking for you, Captain, this morning. I see him a-coming now,” was the sergeant’s oblique response. But he chuckled, walking stiffly away, “He’ll do it; I bet we won’t be here two days longer.” For which glee there was reason, since, inside the hour, the captain was in the colonel’s tent, concluding an eloquent picture of his company’s discomforts with “Somebody has to do something. If you are powerless, Colonel, I’m not. If they don’t give some assurance of changing the camp to-morrow I shall march Company G out and pitch a camp myself, and stand a court-martial. I would rather risk a court-martial than see my men die–and that’s what it has come to!”

The colonel looked the fiery young speaker sternly in the eye, and said something about unsoldierly conduct.

“It would be unmanly conduct for me to let the boys trusted to me die, because I was afraid to speak out,” flung back the captain. “And I know one thing: if I am court-martialed the papers are likely to get the true story.”

“You mean the reporter on the Chicago papers who is snooping around? Let me advise you to give him a wide berth.”

“I mean nothing of the kind, sir. I only mean that the thing will not be done in a corner.”

“Well, well, keep cool, Captain, you’re too good a fellow to fling yourself away. Wait and see if I can’t get something definite out of the major to-day.”

Whereupon the captain departed with outward decent gloom and inward premonitions of rejoicing, for when he had hit a nail on the head he had eyes to see. And the colonel betook himself, hot-foot, to the pompous old soldier in charge of the camp, who happened to be a man of fixed belief in himself, but, if he feared anything, was afraid of a newspaper reporter. The colonel gave him the facts, sparing no squalid detail; indeed, adding a few picturesque embellishments from his own observations. He cut short the other’s contemptuous criticism of boy soldiers, and his comparison with the hardships endured during the Civil War, with a curt “I know they fooled away men’s lives then; that is no reason we should fool them away now. The men are sickening to-day–they will be dying to-morrow; I’m desperate. If that camp is not changed by to-morrow I shall march my regiment out myself and pitch my own camp, and you may court-martial me for it if you like. I would rather stand a court-martial than see my men die, because I was afraid to speak out! The camp we have now is murder, as the reporters say! I don’t wonder that young fellow from Chicago talks hard!”