Kelly?" asked Sergeant Noll Terry, joining them.

"Not grumbling," retorted Kelly. "Just giving my opinion. But this boy
sergeant is trying to make me think this swamp on northern Mindanao is
an earthly paradise."

"Well, isn't it?" challenged Noll. "I know what ails you, Kelly. When
all is peace and comfort, with three 'squares' a day, and not a heap to
do, your old soldier is always kicking. But just send you and the rest,
Kelly, hiking up through those mountains yonder, give you twenty miles a
day of rough climbing, drown you out with rain and let you use up your
shoes chasing a lot of ugly brown men, and never a kick will we hear
coming from you."

"Sure, no," replied Kelly philosophically. "'Tis then we'd be doing a
soldier's work, and a kicker on a hike is as useless as a coffee-cooler
at an afternoon tea."

"In other words," laughed Hal, "a real soldier of the Regular Army is as
patient as a camel when things are all going wrong. The only time when
your real soldier kicks is when he's having it easy and is too
comfortable to be patient. Curious, isn't it?"

"Oh, well, 'tis no use talking to you two," retorted Private Kelly,
shaking his head and strolling away. "Ye've not seen much of service
yet."

"That's another joke," laughed Hal in a low voice, as soon as Kelly had
stepped out of hearing. "Here's a man like Kelly, with fairly long
service to his credit, but he's a private still, and probably always
will be. If the colonel made him a corporal, Kelly wouldn't rest until
he had the chevrons taken from his sleeve so that he could be a private
soldier again. Now you and I, Noll, work like blazes all the time, and
win our promotion, yet Kelly considers us only boys, and boys who don't
know much, either. Either one of us can take Kelly out in a squad and
work him until he runs rivers of perspiration, and he can't talk back
without danger of being disciplined. Yet all the time, Kelly, under our
orders, is thinking of us, half contemptuously, as boys who don't really
know anything about soldiering."

"That's because we're young," laughed Noll.

"And because we're also boyish enough to have a little enthusiasm left
in our make-ups. Noll, how do you really like our new station?"

"I wouldn't be anywhere else," retorted Sergeant Terry, "except some
where else in the Philippines, possibly. One of the prospects that
caught me for the service was the chance of seeing some of our foreign
possessions."

"It's wha