That evening another incident occurred, not less pleasing to the drummer boy. With a block of wood for a seat, and the head of his drum for a desk, he was writing a letter to his mother, by a solitary candle, around which his comrades were playing cards on a table constructed of a rough board and four sticks. Amid the confusion of laughter and disputes, with heads or arms continually intervening between him and the uncertain light, he was pursuing his task through difficulties which would have made many a boy give up in vexation and despair, when a voice suddenly exclaimed, with startling emphasis,--
"Frank Manly, drummer!" And at the same instant something was thrown into the tent, like a bombshell, passing the table, knocking over the candle, and extinguishing the light.
"Well, that's manners, I should say," cried the voice of Seth Tucket, a fellow, as Frank described him, "who makes lots of fun for us, partly because he is full of it himself, and partly because he is green, and don't know any better." Tucket muttered and spat, then broke forth again, "I be darned ef that pesky football didn't take me right in the face, and spatter my mouth full of taller."
"Well, save the _taller_, Seth, for we're getting short of candles," said Frank. "Here, who is walking on my feet?"
"It's me," said Atwater. "I'm going out to see who threw that thing in."
"You're too late," said Frank. "Strike a light, somebody, and let's see what it is. It tumbled down here by my drum, I believe."
There was a general scratching of matches, and after a while the broken candle was set up and relighted.
"I swan to man," then said Tucket, "jest look at that jack-of-spades. He got it in the physiognomy wus'n I did. 'Alas, the mother that him bare, if she had been in presence there, in his _greased cheeks_ and _greasier hair_, she had not known her child.'"
These words from Marmion, aptly altered to suit the occasion, Seth, who was not so green but that he knew pages of poetry by heart, repeated in a high-keyed, nasal sing-song, which set all the boys laughing.
"A pretty way, too, to _turn up_ Jack, I should say," he added, in allusion to the candlestick,--a _turnip_, with a hole in it,--which had rolled over his cards.