Basic Training Read Online Free PDF

Banghart. He jabbed the blade into a bale. “Wouldn’t I, though? Let me tell you something, Haley: If they want to play rough, so can I.”
     
    Haley looked questioningly at Hope, and caught her laughing quietly at his discomfort. He remembered that when he had quizzed her about Mr. Banghart’s hallucinations of a world out to get him, she had shrugged them off as being amusing and nothing more. “I think we’d better go to supper,” Haley murmured.
     
    Hope agreed, and started for the tunnel. Mr. Banghart did not budge, but continued to stare at the blade. Hope nudged him gently to break his fascination. The flashlight slipped from his hand to bang on the floor and go out.
     
    The shock of sudden darkness released Haley’s dammed-up fear. He plunged toward the tunnel, driving with every bit of strength in his legs. His shoulder struck something soft, and he heard Hope cry out in anger. He wriggled into the passageway, and made his way to the corridor in a few seconds, emerging breathless and badly scratched by the splintery floor. He was almost to the loft ladder before realization of what he had done broke his frantic stride. Worse than leaving Hope to defend herself, he had knocked her aside in order to save his own skin.
     
    Fear and Conscience struggled for mastery of his feet. Conscience gained an almost imperceptible advantage, and Haley found himself returning slowly to the tunnel. In his hand was a claw hammer he had found by the ladder.
     
    His rescue mission was frustrated, his honor unredeemed. He was met in the corridor by Hope, who was massaging her right arm, and by Mr. Banghart, whose knife was sheathed and tucked beneath his belt.
     
    “What on earth got into you, all of a sudden?” asked Mr. Banghart solicitously.
     
    “I tripped and fell in the dark,” said Haley quickly. He turned to Hope, and prayed that his lie would make him whole again in her eyes. “I’m sorry, Hope; I didn’t mean to fall against you.”
     
    She shrugged. “Couldn’t be helped, I guess. Don’t worry about it — just a bruise.”
     
    Haley sighed gratefully. They descended the ladder, and walked from the barn together. Mr. Banghart struck out for his own house, and Haley and Hope mounted the back steps to the kitchen. Just before she pushed open the screen door, Hope turned to Haley, who was congratulating himself on having talked his way out of a perfectly desolate situation.
     
    “If you flop as a piano player, you can always make a good living as a bodyguard,” she said.
     

IV.
     
    “Now take the case of the 240 howitzer,” said the General. “Far more effective against concrete bunkers than aerial bombardment. I remember just before the Bulge, the glamour boys dropped everything they had on a Jerry pillbox, and didn’t even chip it. So I called back to First Army Headquarters. ‘Send up some 240s,’ I said. Well sir…”
     
    Haley nodded, and turned his face toward the sunroom windows to hide his yawn from the General. Nothing moved in his line of sight save Mr. Banghart, who bobbed in the distance on the springing seat of a moving machine, circling again and again a shrinking island of standing alfalfa. It was Saturday afternoon; an afternoon, as the bulletin board decreed, for “recreation and cleanup.” Haley had tuned in a concert broadcast on the sunroom’s small radio, but when the General had started to shout war stories above the music, Annie had turned it off. From overhead came a muffled scuffing, Kitty and Hope moving about their rooms, tidying them up. Annie sat in a rocker near Haley, attentive to the General’s words, and seemingly very entertained.
     
    Haley wondered if he should tell the General about Mr. Banghart’s knife. Hope had made him promise not to say anything about it. She had laughed the matter off, and repeated what he had heard from others on the farm, that Mr. Banghart was no more dangerous than the mice in the corncrib. Still and all, he reflected, the