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Metcalf, to keep up the spirits of his company for sleep was next to impossible took out his fiddle and played lively tunes whilst the men danced round the straw, which they set on fire.
On one occasion, towards dusk, he acted as guide to a belated gentleman along the difficult road from York to Harrogate. The road was then full of windings and turnings, and in many places it was no better than a track across unenclosed moors. Metcalf brought the gentleman safe to his inn, "The Granby," late at night, and was invited to join in a tankard of negus.
I'll be a soldier or something. Anyway I'll get out of here and go somewhere and do something exciting, something alive. You can go with me. We'll cut out together. Haven't you got the nerve? Why don't you be my woman?" Young Metcalf took hold of Clara's shoulder and tried to take her into his arms.
Metcalf continued with Captain Thornton and his company throughout all these marchings and countermarchings, determined to be of service to his master if he could, and at all events to see the end of the campaign. At the battle of Falkirk he played his company to the field; but it was a grossly-mismanaged battle on the part of the Royalist General, and the result was a total defeat.
We have just lost our three sons in battle. Before leaving for the front myself I must take their mother to an insane asylum." It became terribly quiet in the carriage. From The Century Magazine Copyright 1915, by The Century Co. Copyright, 1916, by Katharine Metcalf Roof.
"Get out of here," he screamed. "What do you mean, you nasty villain? Get out of here." Frank Metcalf went off along the street laughing defiantly, and Clara went into the house. The sliding doors that led into the living room had been thrown open and the light from a hanging lamp streamed in upon her. Her hair was disheveled and her hat twisted to one side. The man and woman stared at her.
Night came down before they were near enough for operations, and Metcalf turned on his invisible light, expanding the beam to embrace the fleet in its light, and moved the boat to a position about a mile away from its path. It was a weird picture now showing in the periscope: each gray ship a bluish-green against a background of black marked here and there by the green crest of a breaking sea.
When he saw his niece in the arms of the man who had been the subject of so much discussion in his own house and in every respectable house in Columbus, Henderson Woodburn was furious. He forgot the fact that young Metcalf was the son of the president of the company of which he was treasurer. It seemed to him that some sort of a personal insult had been thrown at him by a common ruffian.
All of which made young Surgeon Metcalf, on waiting orders at San Francisco, smile sweetly and darkly to himself: for his last appointment had been the command of a hospital ship, in which position, though a seaman, navigator, and graduate of Annapolis, he had been made the subject of newspaper ridicule and official controversy, and had even been caricatured as going into battle in a ship armored with court-plaster and armed with hypodermic syringes.
This was only the first of a vast number of similar projects on which Metcalf was afterwards engaged, extending over a period of more than thirty years. By the time that he had finished the road, the building of a bridge at Boroughbridge was advertised, and Metcalf sent in his tender with many others.
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