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Bob Holliday and Tom Taylor "chose up sides," the bases were all ready, and by the time Pewee and his aides-de-camp had walked disconsolately to the pond and back, the boys were engaged in a good game of bull-pen. Perhaps I ought to say something about the principles of a game so little known over the country at large.
He was deep in these end-of-semester figures when Pellams burst in at the window, like a storm-driven creature. People never stand on ceremony at the Knockery. It is the corner room on the ground floor. The place has always been the Knockery ever since Mason roomed there, just as the big room over the old dining-hall will be the "Bull-pen" forever.
Yet all wondered what would be the next outbreak of spy work in camp. Private Mock, sentenced to two weeks' arrest for being off the reservation without leave, served his sentence moodily, usually refusing to talk with his fellow-prisoners. One Private Wilhelm was also serving a term in arrest at the bull-pen.
'Look here, says he, 'ye pizenous riptile, he says, 'if ye don't lave me counthryman out iv th' bull-pen in fifteen minyits be th' watch, he says, 'I'll take ye be th' hair iv th' head an' pull ye fr'm th' corner iv Halsted Sthreet to th' r-red bridge, he says. 'Lave us debate this, says Blanco. 'I'll debate nawthin', says Fitz. 'Hurry up, or I'll give ye a slap, he says.
"Lucky for you, Levi," said Shorty, "that he didn't have any of the common prejudices against Jews, and slap you in the bull-pen." "O, but he did," said Rosenbaum. "He hated a Jew worse than any man I ever met. Unt it brought me so near death that I actually watched them digging my grave.
He just takes a dislike to the way a man looks or acts, or the way he parts his hair, looks at him with his steely-gray eyes, unt says coldly: 'Put him in the bull-pen. In the bullpen the poor devil goes, unt the next time General Bragg gets an idea that the discipline of the army is running down, unt he must stiffen it up with a few executions, he orders all the men that happen to be in the bull-pen taken out unt shot."
Yet, Jack was a boy, and he often longed to play games with the others. He felt very sure that he could dodge and run in "bull-pen" as well as any of them. He was very tired of Riley's continual ridicule, which grew worse as Riley saw in him a rival in influence with the smaller boys. "Catch Will alone sometimes," said Bob Holliday, "when Pewee isn't with him, and then thrash him.
By their influence Jack was shut out of the plays. A greenhorn would spoil the game, they said. What did a boy that had lived on Wildcat Creek, in the Indian Reserve, know about playing bull-pen, or prisoner's base, or shinny? If he was brought in, they would go out. But the girls, and the small boys, and good-hearted Bob Holliday liked Jack's company very much.
His name was held against him Wilhelm as a brand-new man in the regiment, and one of the few with whom Mock would talk. One morning the latter was overheard to say: "I'm sick of this war already. I hope the Germans win. If I'm sent over to France I'll watch my chance to desert and get over to the Germans." "Oh, ye will, will ye?" demanded Private Riley, another prisoner in the bull-pen.
"Take him back, Cronin!" said the warden, "and fix him up with outgoing clothes. Unlock him at seven in the morning, and let him come to the bull-pen. Better think over my advice, Valentine." At a quarter past seven on the next morning Jimmy stood in the warden's outer office.
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