|The Fourteenth Infantry, volunteers, were mustered out on the last day
of April. Sandy Cass and Kid Sadler came that night into the great city
of the river and the straits with their heads full of lurid visions
which they set about immediately to realize. Little Irish was with them,
and Bill Smith, who had had other names at other times. And Sandy woke
the next morning in a room that had no furniture but a bed, a washstand,
a cracked mirror, and a chair. He did not remember coming there. Some
one must have put him to bed. It was not Kid Sadler or Little Irish;
they were drunk early, with bad judgment. It must have been Bill Smith.
A hat with a frayed cord lay on the floor. “That's Bill's hat,” he said.
“He's got mine.”
The gray morning filled the window, and carts rattled by in the street.
He rose and drank from the pitcher to clear the bitterness from his
mouth, and saw himself in the glass, haggard and holloweyed. It was a
clean-cut face, with straight, thin lips, straight eyebrows, and brown
hair. The lips were white and lines ran back from the eyes. Sandy did
not think he looked a credit to himself.
“Some of it's yellow fever,” he reflected, “and some of it's jag. About
half and half. The squire can charge it to the yellow.”
He wondered what new thing Squire Cass would find to say to his
“rascally nephew, that reprobate Ulysses.” Squire Cass was a red-faced
gentleman and substantial citizen of that calm New England town of
Wimberton, which Sandy knew very well and did not care for. It was too
calm. But it would be good for his constitution to go there now. He
wondered if his constitution would hold out for another night equally
joyful; “Maybe it might;” then how much of his eighty dollars' back pay
was blown in. He put on his clothes slowly, feeling through the pockets,
collected two half-dollars on the way, came to the last and stopped.
“Must have missed one;” and began again. But that crumpled wad of bills
was gone altogether. “Well, if I ain't an orphan!”
He remembered last a place with bright glass chandeliers, a gilt cupid
over the bar, a girl in a frowzy hat, laughing with large teeth, and Kid
Sadler singing that song he had made up and was so “doggone stuck on”:
“Sandy Cass! A-alas!