“Bully for Tommy’s father!” yelled Bert.  “I hate being lectured, but that sounds like good common sporting sense, and we’ll all try to stick by it on this hunting trip.”

They were a nice lot of boys, all jolly, sturdy, manly chaps, who, however, seldom included Billy Jackson in their outings, for every holiday seemed to find him too busy to join them.  For notwithstanding his unfortunate fear of a gunshot, Billy had always been a great lover of a uniform.  As a youngster he would follow the soldiers every parade day, not for the glory of marching in step to the music of the band, but for the chance it gave him to throw back his shoulders, puff out his small chest, and blow on his tin pipe-whistle in adoring imitation of the bugler.  He thought there was nothing in the world so important as the bugler.  Billy thought it did not matter that the shining little “trumpet” merely voiced an officer’s commands.  The fact always remained that at the clear, steady notes the soldiers wheeled to do his bidding; that the bugler was a power for courage or cowardice, whichever way a boy was built.

Then, as he grew older, he, too, began to practise on a bugle.  He would sit out on the little side verandah, early and late, tooting every regimental call he could remember, until the time came when his perseverance met with reward.  He actually found himself installed as bugler to the little regiment of smartly-uniformed men that was the pride of the gay Ontario city that Billy called home.

Then it was that the other boys never got Billy on a holiday.  When Victoria Day came the soldiers always went “into camp” for three days, strict military discipline reigned, and Billy must be with his company.  When Dominion Day arrived the regiment always visited some distant city to assist in some important patriotic celebration.  Thanksgiving Day always found them in the thick of annual drill, and there was sure to be a “sham battle” at which poor Billy had to toot the commands, his eyes blinking and the nerves chasing themselves up and down his back, while the blank cartridges peppered away harmlessly, and the field-pieces roared innocently past his ears.

“The boys” usually came with throngs of citizens to see the “sham fights.”  They would range themselves on a slope of hills, as near as possible to the “battlefield,” and often above the bellowing guns, above the colonel’s command, above his own shrill bugle calls, Billy could hear Bert Hooper and Tommy McLean egging him on, sometimes with jeers, sometimes with admiration, telling him to “Look up plucky now, Billy, and don’t stop your ears with your fingers!” He used to be astonished at himself that he cared so little whether they teased or cheered.  He seemed to care for nothing in all the world but the Colonel’s voice and his bugle.

Then the day came when he knew there was something greater than the colonel to be obeyed, something dearer than his bugle to be proud of.  For many weeks the newspapers had teemed with little else but news of the South African War.  Nothing was talked of in all Canada, from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, but the battles, the hardships, the privations, of the gallant British regiments in the far-off enemy’s country.  Then came the cry, wrung from England’s heart to her colonies, “Come over and help us!”