"Shut up, Jennings," ordered Bend; "that's cowardly."
"Cowardly, is it? You'll rue those words, my fine fellow. I thrashed you well once, and I've just been praying for another chance, and now I've got it. Cowardly, is it? By Heaven, you'll smart for that!"
And then, calm and dignified, appeared the officer in charge, Lieutenant Allen. A glance at Benny, still livid and gasping, was sufficient. "Go for Dr. Brett," he said to Ames. Then he turned on Jennings, still backed into the corner, and confronted there by his cool young captain. "There seems to be no reasonable doubt that you are your room-mate's assailant, Mr. Jennings. You are placed in close arrest, sir."
Another night, hours later, the wires flashed a message to the widowed mother, bidding her come to the bedside of her only son.
January examinations passed by without material change in the standing of those in whom we are most interested, except in the case of Benny Frazier—too ill to appear before the Board. For weeks he had been "running down," and the assault at the hands of Jennings proved but the climax that brought on a violent and dangerous siege of fever. For days the devoted mother, aided by skilled nurses, was ever at the side of her stricken boy. Volunteers from his class, too, were always in readiness as night-watchers; but almost from the first the one for whom he called and of whom he moaned in his delirium was Geordie Graham. No one saw the meeting between the heart-sick, almost hopeless woman and her son's earliest friend and room-mate, but that she had been deeply agitated was plain. From their interview she came forth clinging to his arm, leaning on his strength, and from that time she was never content to have him far away. Each day, between retreat parade and evening call to quarters, there were hours he could spend at Frazier's bedside, and they were the only hours in all the twenty-four that the feeble, childlike patient looked forward to with anything but apathy. For days his life hung in the balance; but when at last the crisis came and went and left him pitiably weak in body and spirit, the one thing he seemed to cling to in life was Graham's brown and muscular hand.
"I wonder I am not jealous," said Mrs. Frazier to the doctor's kindly wife; "but I thank God my poor boy has such a friend left to him, after all his trouble—all the misery into which that—that awful person has led and held him."