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But the canteen-keeper objected to this. Even when Trautvetter offered him ten, twenty marks for the loan, he remained obstinate. The volunteer struck the counter furiously. "Pig-headed fool!" he cried. "Will you do it for fifty?" The canteen-keeper hesitated. He had settled up the day before; there was not much risk for him, and fifty marks ! "Give me your note-of-hand," he demanded,
The sight of the blubbering giant revolted him. "Stand up, Heppner!" he insisted. "All this is no good. I would give you the money, but God knows I have none at the moment. Let us consider how we can get out of this." The sergeant-major stood up again, and looked at him in suspense. Suddenly Trautvetter pointed to the canteen: "He must lend us something," he whispered.
I think we will let him out of barracks again. You can tell him so." Trautvetter had also returned all his notes-of-hand to his other debtor, Trumpeter-sergeant Henke. The cornet-player did not feel constrained to any special feeling of gratitude for this.
The deputy sergeant-major was away at the big parade-ground with the pioneers. That was half-an-hour's distance. Trautvetter, where was Trautvetter? At last he discovered him in the canteen. "Trautvetter, you must lend me a hundred marks!" said the sergeant-major breathlessly. "Must?" asked the one-year volunteer sarcastically. "Must? Not if I know it!"
She must be certain if Trautvetter was right in his suspicion, and that would need cunning. Her plan was soon made; it was very simple: she need only behave as if she had been following her husband's hint, then he would have to declare himself. "Henke," she began that evening, "Trautvetter has made a proposal to-day.
She had hung down her blushing face and would not look up at him. "I thought as much," he said. Without raising her eyes she asked: "Then why did you do it?" Trautvetter hesitated a moment, then he said gently: "I thought I was doing you a pleasure, Frau Lisbeth." The young woman looked him full in the face for an instant. Then she stood up quickly, took her washing-basket, and departed.
She said nothing about a new request for money with which Henke had charged her, but confessed to him instead that all he had already given her for housekeeping and such-like had been appropriated by her husband, who had used it to buy himself a gold watch-chain, an extra sword, and silver spurs. Trautvetter looked down upon her fair head.
Some days later Wegstetten asked him: "How is the one-year volunteer Trautvetter behaving? I have been quite pleased with him on duty these last few days." And Heppner answered: "He has been much more steady, sir; there has been no fault to find with him." The commander of the battery nodded, well pleased. "You see, sergeant," he said, "my plan has been a success.
At first she thought of furnishing a little shop in the town and setting up a laundry; but Trautvetter begged her rather to go into service for a time. "Why?" asked she. He found some difficulty in answering her. At last he came out with: "I am very fond of you, Frau Lisbeth; and if you could make up your mind to it I should like to ask you if you would have me."
Trautvetter, a bull-necked, square-shouldered man, with a broad chest, took this punishment with great equanimity. He arranged his belongings complacently in his locker and looked calmly round the bare room. His little eyes had a bleary look of perpetual drunkenness, which obscured the hearty, good-humoured expression really natural to them.
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