from John G.
by Katherine Mayo
It was nine o'clock of a wild night in December. For forty-eight hours it had been raining, raining, raining, after a heavy fall of snow. Still the torrents descended, lashed by a screaming wind, and the song of rushing water mingled with the cry of the gale. Each steep street of the hill-town of Greensburg lay inches deep under a tearing flood. The cold was as great as cold may be while rain is falling. A night to give thanks for shelter overhead, and to hug the hearth with gratitude.
First Sergeant Price, at his desk in the Barracks office, was honorably grinding law. Most honorably, because, when he had gone to take the book from its shelf in the day-room, "Barrack-Room Ballads" had smiled down upon him with a heart-aching echo of the soft, familiar East; so that of a sudden he had fairly smelt the sweet, strange, heathen smell of the temples in Tien-sin—had seen the flash of a parrot's wing in the bolo-toothed Philippine jungle. And the sight and the smell, on a night like this, were enough to make any man lonely.
Therefore it was with honor indeed that, instead of dreaming off into the radiant past through the well thumbed book of magic, he was digging between dull sheepskin covers after the key to the bar of the State, on which his will was fixed.
Now, a man who, being a member of the Pennsylvania State Police, aspires to qualify for admission to the bar, has his work cut out for him. The calls of his regular duty, endless in number and kind, leave him no certain leisure, and few and broken are the hours that he gets for books.
"Confound the Latin!" grumbled the Sergeant, grabbing his head in his two hands. "Well—anyway, here's my night for it. Even the crooks will lie snug in weather like this." And he took a fresh hold on the poser.1
Suddenly "buzz" went the bell beside him. Before its voice ceased he stood at salute in the door of the Captain's office.
"Sergeant," said Captain Adams, with a half-turn of his desk-chair, "how soon can you take the field?"
"Five minutes, sir."
"There's trouble over in the foundry town. The local authorities have jailed some I.W.W.2 plotters. They state that a jail delivery is threatened, that the Sheriff can't control it, and that they believe the mob will run amuck generally and shoot up the town. Take a few men; go over and attend to it."
"Very well, sir."
In the time that goes to saddling a horse, the detail rode into the storm, First Sergeant Price on John G., leading.
John G. had belonged to the Force exactly as long as had the First Sergeant himself, which was from the dawn of the Force's existence. And John G. is a gentleman and a soldier, every inch of him. Horse-show judges have affixed their seal to the self-evident fact by the sign of the blue ribbon, but the best proof lies in the personal knowledge of "A" Troop, soundly built on twelve years' brotherhood. John G., on that diluvian night, was twenty-two years old, and still every whit as clean-limbed, alert, and plucky as his salad days had seen him.
Men and horses dived into the gale as swimmers dive into a breaker. It beat their eyes shut with wind and driven water, and, as they slid down the harp-pitched city streets, the flood banked up against each planted hoof till it split in folds above the fetlock.
Down in the country beyond, mud, slush, and water clogged with chunks of frost-stricken clay made worse and still worse going. And so they pushed on through blackest turmoil toward the river road that should be their highway to Logan's Ferry.
1. a puzzling or baffling question
2. Industrial Workers of the World, a union organization which often demonstrated for worker's rights
7
Select ALL the correct answers.
What are two reasons the narrator includes specific details in the story about the severity of the weather?
The weather sets a mood that in turn creates an attitude of gratefulness in Price for his particular line of work.
The call to go out on duty comes as a particularly unexpected annoyance to Price in view of the conditions.
The purpose for Price's call to go out on duty comes as a direct result of the weather conditions.
The weather conditions make it impossible for Price and his detail to fulfill the task given to him.
The weather anticipates the challenge a mounted police detail will face as the story develops.
- The weather sets a mood that in turn creates an attitude of gratefulness in Price for his particular line of work.
- The weather conditions make it impossible for Price and his detail to fulfill the task given to him.