as disconcertingly gone, and ran his fingers through his wildly rumpled hair. "Oh," he said, grinning slyly, then dropping the grin as suddenly as it had come. "To see The Man." "Thats whats the matter," Prew said, shooting another ball. "I remember you," Warden said darkly. "Little boy bugle. ... I'll call you." Before Prew could answer he was gone. Prew went on shooting pool, thinking how typical it was of Warden not to order him to stop, any other topkick would have, but Warden did not work that way. He went on shooting, methodically, first one ball and then another, missing only once. The table clean, he racked the balls and hung up his cue, feeling how the thing had gone flat now. He stood looking at the table for a minute and then switched off the light and went out to the porch. They were still going strong in the Orderly Room. Maggio was still concentratedly peeling spuds. From the kitchen came the moist sounds of someone banging pots and pans around. The irregular clacking of the typewriter in the supplyroom had ceased. He seemed suspended in a void of bodyless activity, while G Company's morning moved on ponderously and implacably all around him, indifferent to this transfer that was so monumental in his life, and of which he was not a part. He was, it seemed like, standing on a high place where all the highways met and there were signposts to all places, and where the variegated colors of the license plates whizzed by and did not see him standing there and none would stop and pick him up. The cook, in whites, came out, his face still red. He went into the kitchen slamming the door after first telling Maggio to get the goddam hell out of the road with his goddam can of spuds and things began to move again for Prew. "What'd I tell you?" Maggio leered at him. He grinned and flipped his cigaret and exhaled, watching the smoke float into the sun where it suddenly became full-bodied, visible in all its unending swirls. That was G Company, he thought, deceptively simple yet in the light full of hidden complex designs, unending meanings, in which he was entangled now. Before the cigaret hit the ground Warden bellowed, "All right, Prewitt!" out the window at him. With a grudging admiration Prew felt he had been subtly scored on. How could Warden know that he had left the dayroom? There was an uncanny sardonic insight in The Warden that approached the supernatural. Prew slung his hat up on his shoulder with his arm shoved through the strap, so nobody could steal it while he was inside, and entered. "Private Prewitt reporting to the Compny Commander as ordered, Sir," he mouthed the formula, whatever humanness there was inside him falling out, leaving only a juiceless meatless shell. Capt Dynamite Holmes, who was a favorite with the Islands sport fans, directed his long, high-foreheaded face with its high cheekbones and eagle's nose and the hair combed sideways across the just beginning bald spot, sternly at the man before him and picked up the Special Orders that announced the transfer without looking at them. "At ease," he said. His desk was right before the door, and at right angles on the left was the First Sergeant's desk, where Milt Warden sat with folded elbows leaning on it. As he moved his left foot and crossed his hands behind his back, Prew spared him one swift glance. Warden stared back at him, half-gleefully, half-foreboding; he seemed to be poised and waiting for his chance. Capt Holmes swung his swivel chair to the right and stared sternly out the window for a moment, offering Prew a profile of the jutting jaw, grim mouth, and sharp commanding nose. Then suddenly he swung back around, the swivel creaking, and began to speak. "I always make it a policy to talk to my new men, Prewitt," he said sternly. "I dont know what you've been used to in the Bugle Corps, but in my outfit we run it by the book. Any man who fucksup gets broken - quick and hard. The Stockade is the place for fuckups until they learn to soldier."
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