When I closed that bathroom door and noticed that sign again, I had to laugh. All one needed in this man’s army in order to get along was a little intelligence. —2— The day after my bath, we had trouble. I guess it was my own fault, for I should have told Ben about meeting Chilblaines in the bath, then he’d have been prepared for his visit the next morning. The result of my negligence was that Esky was resting comfortably under the head of my bunk when the inspecting officers appeared, and when Ben saw Chilblaines it was too late to do anything about the pup. The snooty little lieut just had to poke his head in our place and look under the bunk. As Ben says, he would have looked under there if he didn’t look anywhere else all day. And when he saw what was there, he exploded like a bomb. “Is this the way you men were taught to obey orders?” he demanded of Ben, who glowered at him, although he must have been scared stiff. “How did that dog get aboard after I explicitly told Canwick to get rid of it?” Ben shrugged his shoulders but didn’t answer. “Answer me! Are you dumb?” “No, sir,” declared Ben promptly. “First I know that dog was here—he musta followed us.” Such a brazen, impossible falsehood must have given the lieut chills and fever. “Followed you, eh!” he stormed. “That’s mighty reasonable, isn’t it, when officers were watching everything that came aboard!” “Well—” Ben tried to help his explanation by details. But the officer impatiently waved his words away. “Keep still! I don’t want to hear any more of your prevarications. That dog must be got rid of at once. Tell Canwick he will hear from this without delay.” And the puffy little runt stamped away to finish his tour of inspection. As soon as he left the compartment, Ben hurried out to find me, and a few minutes later I discovered him parked for patient waiting in front of the General’s door. He lost no time in recounting what had happened and ended his recital with, “So you just beat this guy to it and tell the Gen. all about the works!” Well, I couldn’t decide what to do, but finally came to the conclusion that I could do nothing else but put it up to the General, although I wasn’t as confident of his judgment as Ben seemed to be. I don’t know how Ben knew so much about my boss, but he seemed to have implicit faith in him. Maybe it was as my partner says, “A man can’t get to be a General unless he’s a real human being!” So I interrupted the General’s home work in French and proceeded to tell him how my pet dog had followed me to camp, had been sent home and chained, had broken out and come a hundred miles through a snowstorm to rejoin me the night we left for Hoboken. “And now the Lieutenant has discovered him under my bunk and threatens to get rid of him.” “Well, sergeant, you did disobey orders, didn’t you?” he observed, but not unkindly. Just sort of a paternal reproof.