Found my dog!

I was over in another section of the cantonment this morning, for a few moments between drill and mess call, and there was “Local Board No. 163” as big as life, trotting along beside a chap I knew. It was Billy Allen. The dog recognized me and so did Billy and we stopped a while and compared notes.

Billy had the worst hard luck story in respect to the Draft of any man I know. He’s an old National Guardsman, having enlisted soon after we left school together. Spent eight years in the infantry, and went to the Border. He left the service after he got back and a little later when a call came for men for the Officers’ Reserve Corps he applied and was accepted, for the second camp. Meanwhile he had registered as a man of draft age. Then came his call for Officers’ Training Camp, where he was making out famously; so well in fact that he was recommended for the aero-plane service.

But the recommendation was as far as he got. The drawing had meanwhile been made in Washington, he was well up in the list and one fine day he received a notice to appear for examination. Of course he passed and was accepted. That yanked him out of the Officers’ Reserve and now he’s down here, a private in the “Suicide Club,” with Buck Winters, an old classmate of both of us, his commanding officer.

I told him about “Local Board No. 163” whom he had dubbed “Mut” because he looked it. First we were going to match for the dog, but we decided, after a moment’s reflection, to let him choose his master. Billy said good-bye and walked one way and I walked the other and the dog, after a moment’s hesitation, went with Billy. And so I lost my dog a second time. I guess he didn’t like my cold water treatment for fleas.

An interesting thing happened here to-day that just shows how vast this huge cantonment is. The cot next to Fat and two below me has been vacant ever since we have been here. To-night a chap came in from the barracks next door, bag and baggage, and took possession of it. Fat made his acquaintance right off, and the newcomer told him that he had been transferred to this company about the time we were—a week or so ago—and since no one told him where to go or where to bunk he went to the barracks next door and took a cot.

But he really belonged in here and was a member of our squad, which for some mysterious reason had always remained a seven-man squad, with the eighth man assigned to it but never heard from. Every roll call he had been marked absent, and he had been put down as a deserter and an alarm sent out for him through the country. At the present moment the New York police are searching diligently for him.

And all the time he has been within a biscuit toss of his proper place.

Over in the other company he was an outcast, and they didn’t know what to do with him. They were on the point of sending him back to the city as an interloper when somehow the mistake was discovered and he was summoned to report over here. The interesting part of it is, that he is an expert accountant, and his specialty is searching out mistakes that other people make in the way of misplaced figures and things.

So far as the police were concerned, he said, he didn’t care much, for the last place they would ever look for him was down here. Speaking of deserters, I noticed three sets of finger-prints on our bulletin board which means that three men have taken French leave and they have prices on their heads, already.