it. "My love," said he, "my Second Lieutenant is grievously mislaid in
the cavalry. Providence designed him for the artillery."

It was wifely but not right in Catherine to repeat this strict
confidence in strictest confidence to her neighbor, Mrs. Bainbridge,
over the fence next morning before breakfast. At breakfast Mrs.
Bainbridge spoke of artillery reinforcing the post, and her husband
giggled girlishly and looked at the puzzled Duane; and at dinner Mrs.
Starr asked Albumblatt, would not artillery strengthen the garrison?

"Even a light battery," pronounced Augustus, promptly, "would be absurd
and useless."

Whereupon the mess rattled knives, sneezed, and became variously
disturbed. So they called him Albumbattery, and then Blattery, which is
more condensed; and Captain Duane's official tone availed him nothing
in this matter. But he made no more little military jokes; he disliked
garrison personalities. Civilized by birth and ripe from weather-beaten
years of men and observing, he looked his Second Lieutenant over, and
remembered to have seen worse than this. He had no quarrel with the
metric system (truly the most sensible), and thinking to leaven it with
a little rule of thumb, he made Augustus his acting quartermaster. But
he presently indulged his wife with the soldier-cook she wanted at home,
so they no longer had to eat their meals in Albumblatt's society; and
Mrs. Starr said that this showed her husband dreaded his quartermaster
worse than the Secretary of War.

Alas for the Quartermaster's sergeant, Johannes Schmoll, that routined
and clock-work German! He found Augustus so much more German than he
had ever been himself, that he went speechless for three days. Upon his
lists, his red ink, and his ciphering, Augustus swooped like a bird
of prey, and all his fond red-tape devices were shredded to the winds.
Augustus set going new quadratic ones of his own, with an index and
cross-references. It was then that Schmoll recovered his speech and
walked alone, saying, "Mein Gott!" And often thereafter, wandering among
the piled stores and apparel, he would fling both arms heavenward and
repeat the exclamation. He had rated himself the unique human soul at
Fort Brown able to count and arrange underclothing. Augustus rejected
his laborious tally, and together they vigiled after hours, verifying
socks and drawers. Next, Augustus found more horseshoes than his papers
called for.

"That man gif me der stomach pain