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Shortly after six in the morning, with an expression on his face of commingled hatred and gloom, seeing no one, recognizing no one, Smoke left the Elkhorn and went up Main Street, behind him the three hundred, formed in disorderly ranks, chanting: "Hay-foot! Straw-foot! Hep! Hep! Hep!" "Good-night, fellows," he said bitterly, at the edge of the Yukon bank where the winter trail dipped down.
There was a company of Germans, or Dutchmen, as the boys always called them; and the boys believed that they each had hay in his right shoe, and straw in his left, because a Dutchman was too dumb, as the boys said for stupid, to know his feet apart any other way; and that the Dutch officers had to call out to the men when they were marching, "Up mit de hay-foot, down mit de straw-foot links, links, links!"
Certainly those sun-burnt "doughboys" were not bothering themselves about trochees and iambi and such toys of cultivated "literary" persons; they were amusing themselves on the march by inventing words to fit the "goose-step." Their Unus homo mille mille mille decollavimus "Hay-foot, straw-foot, belly full of bean-soup Hep Hep!"
There was a company of Germans, or Dutchmen, as the boys always called them; and the boys believed that they each had hay in his right shoe, and straw in his left, because a Dutchman was too dumb, as the boys said for stupid, to know his feet apart any other way; and that the Dutch officers had to call out to the men when they were marching, "Up mit de hay-foot, down mit de straw-foot links, links, links!"
"I'm going to fire him!" West laughed merrily. His face always looked most charming when he smiled. "Upon my word I believe you can do it." "I have done it, lots of times." "Ah! And is the ceremony ever attended by scenes of storm and violence?" "Never. They march like little lambs when I say the word. Hay-foot straw-foot!" "But then your aunt loses their arrears of board, I suppose."
We were a small and an unknown tribe. The Gobstown contingent always brought up the rear of the procession a gawky, straggling, bad-stepping, hay-foot, straw-foot lot! The onlookers hardly glanced at us. We stood for nothing. We had no name.
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