And Jeanne said something more and waited. And of course Plug Ugly only guessed at what she was trying to say, and I could see his twisted ears go fiery red in the rain when Jeanne reached up suddenly and kissed him on the cheek.
“Sure t’ing. Youse’ll git ’im back,” he muttered again.
* * * *
As I said, I was lying there, listening to the whisperin’ in the grass, puzzling over what it might be in Plug Ugly’s face that made it seem different. And Plug Ugly was looking at the looie lying there.
The looie must have raised his shoulder a little too high, trying to ease himself over. I saw his face go white through the mud and his eyes go suddenly wide.
Next he slumps down and groans, and a little river of red runs along the back of his hand. Plug Ugly saw it, too. He got to the looie and tries to lift him up a little, but the looie only moans and sinks his face between his arms.
It was getting lighter now, and only about fifty yards away I could begin to make out a grotesque hump above the ravine, between us and the tree stumps where the machine guns were. It made me sick all over. That was what was left of the thirteen that had been with the looie.
Further along the sector the dawn barrage of the heavies opens up. Plug Ugly rolls the looie over and looks at his white face. The looie’s lips were twitching.
Plug Ugly must have thought he was out for keeps. He turned to me. His whole face had changed. He looked at me lying there, but I don’t think he saw me. His blue eyes glinted and set on something it wasn’t for me to see.
I heard his teeth grit out the words, “Sure t’ing. Youse’ll git ’im back.”
The Heinies’ were quiet now in the machine-gun nest. I guess, giving it the once-over, they didn’t figure any one was left alive out there. They’d sowed the grass over our head so full of whispers that it looked like a mowing scythe had passed over.
I didn’t quite get what Plug Ugly intended to do, until I saw him take a couple of grenades from the looie’s shirt.
Then he rolled over to me.
“Gimme them apples,” he muttered, reaching his hand.
“You damn fool, you can’t go out—”
“Gimme them apples,” he repeated, pushing my hands away and grabbing at my shirt front.
He didn’t bother dragging his rifle. All he had was his pistol and a shirt full of bombs. I wanted to keep him from going, but the Heinies have long ears and I couldn’t argue.
Last thing Plug Ugly did was ease the looie over.
He started out, snaking through the grass to the left. I saw his idea, and it was crazy.
Up to the left of the stumps where the machine guns were planted, was a little hummock. Even if he got up there, I knew there would be at least a dozen Dutchies in the emplacements.
Maybe it was only a few minutes, but it seemed like I had been laying there for hours. One of the Heinies must have seen Plug Ugly crawling before he got to the top of the hummock back of the stumps. Pistols began cracking in the gun emplacement. Still there wasn’t a sound from Plug Ugly. I got weak all over. I thought sure they’d got him.
I saw a Heinie sneak out from the stumps and up toward the hummock. Then—that damned fool! The ugliest face in the A. E. F. came leaping from the ground. That Heinie must have thought he had met the devil in person.
I saw Plug Ugly pull the pin of an apple. The Heinie’s pistol cracked, and Plug Ugly went down on one knee. But he drew back and he didn’t deviate an inch from the regulations in throwing that bomb.
I drove my face into the ground and covered up with my arms. Dirt and rocks and pieces of tree stumps showered down. When I looked up, something had cut the looie across the forehead, and his cheek was streaked with blood. He groaned, and I knew he was still alive.
But Plug Ugly?
God, he waited until that Heinie had drawn back his bayonet and was coming down. Plug Ugly ducked and his pistol spat a red streak into the Heinie’s stomach. The Heinie pitched forward and his bayonet went into the ground.
I could hear men groaning and yelling where the gun nest had been, and a half dozen of the Heinies started up out of the ground at once. Maybe it was luck, and maybe it wasn’t. It may be that Plug Ugly, looking death in the teeth, deliberately timed that second pineapple.
Fragments of Heinies was mixed with the flowerpot of dirt that went up. And then, with an apple in each hand, Plug Ugly came yelling down that hummock, straight for the stumps.
Three, four Heinies were falling over each other running away. I got one straight look at Plug Ugly’s face. Say, at that minute, I haven’t seen a handsomer map in the world.
Plug Ugly? Hell!
Then it got so quiet, except for a booming far away, that I could hear the looie breathing heavy. He was getting up. He looked across and saw there was no one by the machine-gun nest alive but Plug Ugly.
“By God! By God! He got ’em—huh? He got ’em?”
And what do you think? The next thing the looie did was to begin brushing the mud off his clothes. He’d only been nicked a little on one shoulder.
“Sure t’ing,” I said. “Youse’ll git ’im back.”
I couldn’t think of anything nastier than that. I guess it hit the looie between the eyes. I think he would have kicked me, except for my busted prayer bone.
Yellow? Sure as hell, he was yellow. We know now he wasn’t with the lost thirteen when they got theirs. He’d crawled off to one side somewhere.
That Jeanne. I don’t see why I hadn’t guessed it. Didn’t I say she was a haughty-totty. She’d been taught, Jeanne had. She could read men, that Frenchie, and she had had the looie ticketed long before we guessed him out.
They had me stretched out across from Plug Ugly in the base hospital when Jeanne came in. She went straight to him.
Plug Ugly had been drilled three times, but I tell you, he was tough. He’d been a punching bag a long time.
He opened his eyes and saw Jeanne.
“Sure t’ing,” I heard him murmur. “Youse’ll git ’im—”
And that was as far as he got, for Jeanne’s lips were on his mouth and both her arms were cuddling his ugly cauliflower ears.
That’s one language that never has to be translated.
A ONE-MAN NAVY, by Eugene Cunningham
“I’m fit to be tied!” said “Wolver” Dean, late pointer of the forecastle three-inch, S. S. Cohoxon, and a member of the armed guard detail, as he leaned upon the forecastle of the lean gray little Shenandoah. Over the life lines he could see the convoy forming. There were miscellaneous merchantmen, large and small, fast and slow; for in these early months of the war, little attention was paid to assorting merchant vessels according to their speed.
Yesterday Wolver had been a member of the armed guard and perfectly happy, while today he was one of the cruiser’s first division and entirely miserable.
“Every time you try to figure out a commonsense way of doin’ somethin’ in this man’s navy, you run your head into the loop of some 22-caliber regulation, and down you come on your ear, like a piled steer.”
He was justifiably peevish. Transferred in early April from the big cruiser Wilmerton to the armed guard, he had drawn the Cohoxon, an ancient freighter. But it was duty that suited his solitary and independent nature perfectly. Down in Texas, this lank, angular, steel-muscled young man had been a wolver. Every lobo he had trapped or shot represented a particular problem. He had had to outguess the wolf. All this discipline that the outfit set so much store by seemed foolish to Wolver Dean.
“Listen, country!” an angry voice snarled in his ear. “Y’ done not a solitary thing since y’ come aboard this mornin’ but mull around and moon overside. Now, y’ happen to be on the Shenandoah, see? Happen to be in my section, see? An’ if y’ was to be Josephus Daniels’ old-maid sister, y’d turn to with y’ ears snappin’ back, when I spoke to y’, see? Now—”
Deftly, the big cox’n named Purdy caught Wolver’s lean shoulder. He half-twisted, half-pushed, and
finally applied the toe of a number-ten shoe to the seat of Wolver’s blue regulation trousers.
Nobody had ever kicked any of the Deans around and walked off the scene without contusions to report—not any of the Deans Wolver had ever heard of. He was hardly conscious of what he did, so automatic and instinctive was his reaction to this insult from the hulking red-headed cox’n.
He wrenched his left shoulder from Purdy’s grasp and whirled. The cox’n, not expecting any activity of this precise sort, took a fist in the midriff. He doubled up like a jackknife; for the right hook, driven with all the force of Wolver’s powerful shoulders and the momentum of his pivoting body, had caught the old sailor with muscles relaxed.
Wolver hooked a hard left to the jaw, as Purdy sagged; smacked him on the ear with a vicious glancing right upper-cut; and saw Purdy drop to his knees on the deck.
“You two men!” a voice bellowed overhead. “Lay up to the bridge, here, both of you. On the double!”
Wolver looked thoughtfully that way. It was the executive officer, red and angry. But, another officer appeared at this moment, to whisper in the executive’s ear. The executive officer shrugged impatiently. But when Wolver and Purdy—the cox’n still panting for breath—came up to the bridge, the exec hummed and hawed.
“What was the trouble down there?” he asked with a sort of forced mildness.
“Trouble, sir?” Wolver’s eyes opened widely, innocently.
“No trouble at all, sir,” Purdy managed to mumble, between great inhalations. “We—we was kind of scuffling y’ see, sir. That’s all!”
“Hmm,” said the executive officer. “Dean, something tells me that your career on the Shenandoah is apt to be hectic. Perhaps you may come to regret reporting aboard.”
“Yes, sir,” Wolver nodded earnestly. “You’re absotively correct, sir. I already am. I never wanted to come a-tall. All I was wantin’ was to stick in the armed guard, sir. An’—an’ I certainly would take it as a mighty big favor, sir, if you’d fix it up to le’ me go back, right now.”
“Why, then, did you tear yourself from the bosom, as it were, of the armed guard?” This was a new voice to Wolver. He turned slowly, and saw a brisk little man with sharp black eyes, a big nose, and an immaculate uniform with four gleaming gold stripes on the cuffs. Wolver saluted respectfully and stood at attention.
“Why, if you so loved and cherished the armed guard,” Captain Banning continued, “did you arrange for transfer?”
“I never, sir!” Wolver replied sadly. “‘Twas a young ensign, let out a year ahead of time, that arranged ever’thing. He was assistant personnel officer, cap’n. An’ he come up as I was helpin’ out some of the boys with their splash practice, and he never liked what I was sayin’. I tried to explain to him, cap’n, that I was just figurin’ a short cut, like. But he says I was insolent, and I never was meanin’ to be, a-tall. But he shanghaied me out of the armed guard pronto.”
“Dear, dear!” sighed the captain. “But in spite of that, you want to go back and fight the battles of democracy upon the fo’c’s’le of a cargo boat; protect with the faithful three-inch the supplies intended for our gallant boys over there and so on.”
“If I could be sent over to one of them—” Wolver suggested, nodding toward the merchantmen. “I certainly do want to git back onto the armed guard, sir. It’s the only duty in the navy that lets a man use the inside of his head, Texas style.”
“No, I fear me not. You’ll have to stay with us. We can’t transfer you here. But—you’ll have to go on to Queenstown. Perhaps a way will open for you, to return some day.”
“Oh, I’ll git back, a’ right, sir,” Wolver said calmly.
“In the meanwhile, lay below and turn to! And make up your mind that the war isn’t to be finished in a day, You’ll have a chance to smell powder yet—this very trip, it may be. So make yourself one of us—and move on the double!”
Wolver recognized the new note in Captain Banning’s voice that now replaced his bantering manner. But as Wolver saluted and turned toward the port ladder, with Purdy following, he sniffed. He would smell powder, would he? That was a good one, when on his first and only trip across with the Cohoxon, they had fought and sunk a sub. He and the trainer had sunk it, after he had killed the German skipper and a lieutenant with an automatic, pulling the battle out of the bag when it was lost.
* * * *
That night, he stood his gun watches and his lookout with the rest of Purdy’s section of the starboard watch. And he admitted that Purdy was all right; the cox’n made no distinction between Wolver and any other of his section. He was square, if he did get hard-boiled. But that eased Wolver’s homesickness none at all, as he looked across the moonlit water and saw the black hulls of the merchantmen in their columns. That was where he fitted—out there on one of them, standing watch at the guns, with no formalities if a sub heaved in sight.
The days slid by evenly, as they do at sea. Five of them—six. The seventh day out of New York drew to a hazy twilight. Wolver looked out at the moonless, cloud-obscured sky and shook his head. Mechanically—as if all this were his private responsibility—he looked at the Shenandoah’s decks, from which the deckload of coal was vanishing, looked at the shells and powder bags under the tarpaulin by number nine, the fo’c’s’le gun. Have to watch out, tonight!
The convoy was shifting formation, as all early convoys did. Ships which had been file leaders had dropped back until they lagged in the rear of columns they had led. One twin-screw, shining Philadelphia freighter, apparently the best ship in the seventeen the Shenandoah was escorting, had dropped out of the convoy entirely, her starboard engine out of commission.
Wolver had drawn pointer of the forecastle gun. On the mid-watch, shortly after midnight, there was an odd phosphorescent-like glitter to the sea. There was a glimpse of the hull of a freighter, as the Shenandoah turned from her post in the van, to go back around the convoy’s rear and up through the files, to see how everything was going with the ships. You could see a hull for a split second, quite clearly, but the eye was tricked so that details evaded you.
They were not zigzagging; Captain Banning had decided to make as much speed and as many sea miles as possible, while there was no actual sign of danger.
As the Shenandoah came around the rear of the convoy, Wolver and the trainer were muttering to each other. Wolver, staring with those plainsman’s eyes of his out at the sea, thought he saw something low down on the water, perhaps a hundred yards astern of the nearest cargo boat. He stiffened, with tawny head thrust out and his mouth drawing to a thin line. He grunted to the trainer and without thought, the trainer spun his wheel; number nine came around to starboard and Wolver hunted that half-seen shape through the telescope sight, as he depressed the muzzle out of horizontal.
“What the hell y’ guys doin’?” snarled Purdy, who was gun captain.
But Wolver, concentrating rigidly on his hunt for that half-seen, half imagined shape out there, heard Purdy’s voice if at all, only as an angry and far-away murmuring. It looked like a sub, but might be only a blackfish or a porpoise. Still—
“Steady on it!” he muttered, to himself rather than to the others of the crew.
His thumb tensed on the firing button. But at that moment the helmsman, in obedience to an order of the officer of the deck, who chanced to be Ensign Robards, the first division officer, twirled his wheel to starboard. The fo’c’s’le five-inch roared, but Wolver had seen the grayish shape vanish, sliding out of the cross wires of the sight, even as he fired. The shell skipped across the gleaming water perilously close to that ancient tramp so magnificently named The Burmese Rajah.
Wolver tore off his blue knitted watch-cap and hurled it to the deck. Furiously he stamped upon it, all the while glaring at the bridge.
“Oh, what’s the use?” he snarled, “Spoiled as purty a shot as ever I see! Yanked me right off—”
“Who fired that shot?” came Ensign Robards’ voice shrilly from the bridg
e. “Who gave orders to fire that shot?”
“This bright and shinin’ light out of the armed guard, sir!” Purdy answered angrily. “Nobody give him orders. He was just runnin’ things to suit hisself, sir!”
“Relieve him! Send him up here instantly!”
When Wolver got to the bridge, he faced not only the ensign, but all the senior officers of the cruiser, who had arrived at the run, wakened by the roar of the five-inch.
“Who told you to fire that shot?” Captain Banning demanded grimly. “Don’t you know that we’ve been trying to move through this zone with the absolute minimum of noise? And you nearly sank the Burmese Rajah! Answer up! What have you to say for yourself?”
Wolver sagged wearily before them. Regulations! Formalities! Orders! Everything on the earth and the sea but some common sense. And how could he say anything that would explain his point of view.
“Nobody told me, sir,” he said slowly. “I just let go on my own hook.”
“Oh, you did! Well, well, well,” the captain said unpleasantly. “And I presume it was merely to relieve the tedium of your watch? You wearied of monotony, perhaps?”
“I figured, sir, that sinkin’ subs was what I was supposed to be there for. Hadn’t been for the helmsman changin’ course just as I whanged away, there’d have been a right sick tin fish out there now. I was steady on it, and as I pressed the button, the ship heeled over to sta’b’d, and my shot went wild. Two seconds more and I would have gethered him in.”
“Utter nonsense, sir!” Mr. Robards said disgustedly. “I was scanning the water all around the ship with my glasses. There wasn’t a sign of anything there, except the Burmese Rajah’s wake.”
“It looked like it was just comin’ up,” Wolver said without interest. “Just barely awash. I got a glimpse of the connin’ tower, seemed like, with a double bow wave a-runnin’ aft along the sides.”
“But nobody else could see it, of course,” Mr. Robards said ironically. “We have only one pair of eyes on the ship—yours. Very peculiar. Very!”
The Military Megapack Page 34