COUTING AUTO

Reveille sounded at five o'clock. There was plenty to be done before the
war game actually began. There were plans to be laid, codes to be
determined, umpires to be consulted as to vague and indefinite rules,
and all sorts of little things that in a real war would have adjusted
themselves. But the Scouts were well out of the excitement. They struck
their tents and handed them over, neatly arranged, with all their
bedding, to the men from the commissary department.

"Sleeping bags for us, after to-day," explained Durland. "That is, if we
have to sleep in the open. Sometimes we'll get a barn or a hayrick, or
even a bed in a farmhouse. We won't worry about all that. But we're not
going to sit still, and we can't scout and carry tents and dunnage of
that sort along. So I said I'd turn it all in."

Then the Troop waited, quietly, for the orders that seemed so slow in
coming. But they came at last. A young officer rode up on a horse that
was dripping wet.

"General Harkness's compliments, Captain," he said, saluting Durland,
"and you will take your Troop at once to Bremerton, on the State line.
You will make your headquarters there, where a field telegraph station
has been established. Please hold your Scouts for the stroke of twelve,
when they may cross the line. The line for five miles on each side of
Bremerton is in your territory."

"My compliments to General Harkness, and we will start at once," replied
Durland.

And a moment later they were on the hike. There was plenty of time,
since Bremerton was less than three miles away, and it was scarcely
seven o'clock, but it was cooler then than it would be later, and
Durland was glad to get his Troop away from the bustle and apparent
confusion of the camp where the Red army was beginning to move.

"Where are the divisional headquarters to be to-day?" Durland asked a
hurrying staff officer who passed just then.

"Hardport--across the line," the staff man replied, as he paused a
moment. A wide grin illuminated his features. "That's nerve for you, eh?
The old man's pretty foxy. He's going to start us moving so that we'll
begin crossing the State line on the stroke of twelve, and he'll fling a
brigade into Hardport before two o'clock."

Durland whistled.

"That's fine, if it works," he remarked to Dick Crawford, later. "But
Hardport practically is the key to the railroad situation, and it isn't
conceivable that the Blues will leave it unguarded. I'm inc