“So Pug Kennedy is a scrapper, is he?” observed Jerry, when Ned told him the result of the talk with the other boy. “Well, it’s as well to know that first as last. I hope he isn’t sent to our camp. But, if he is, we’ll have to make the best of it.”
It was noted that “Pug” answered to the title of Michael, and it was assumed that “Pug” had been the characterization given him because of his fancied resemblance to a dog of that breed--a resemblance more real, in certain ways, than fancied.
In the following days the recruits were measured, weighed, tested in various ways, and finally were all sworn in as privates in the United States army that was eventually to fight, in France or elsewhere, the troops of the Central Powers.
To Bob’s distress he was held up by one doctor, as being overweight, and was close to being rejected. But his chums took him in hand, and for a day starved him on a most reduced diet, and made him take so much exercise that Bob lost about five pounds, and passed.
“But it was a close call,” said Jerry, when all was safe. “Don’t go to stuffing yourself with pie or crullers until after you’re in the camp. Then they won’t put you out, I dare say.”
“I’ll be careful,” promised Bob, now quite anxious.
And, three days later, the motor boys, with a number of their friends from Cresville, and with others whom they did not know, including the unpleasant Pug Kennedy, were sent to Camp Dixton, there to be given a thorough training for their new life in the army.
Out of the gray, chilly, and silent dawn came the sharp notes of a bugle. The sound echoed among the mist-enshrouded hills, the notes vibrating in and out among the trees, and then seemed to die away in the distance.
But if any one of the several thousand prospective soldiers, sleeping the sleep of the more or less just in the tents of Camp Dixton, thought it was but a dream, those notes of the bugle, he was sadly, if not rudely, awakened when the sound came with greater insistence, as if calling over and over again:
“I say, Ned!” lazily called Bob from his bed amid the blankets on the ground under a khaki tent, “what day is it?”
“What difference does that make?” asked Ned. “What time is it?”
“You ought to know without asking, when you hear that _horn_,” grunted Jerry.