Read "The Delectable Mountains" by Arthur Willis Colton online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
The Fourteenth Infantry, volunteers, were mustered out on the last day of April. Sandy Cass and Kid Sadler came that night into the great city of the river and the straits with their heads full of lurid visions which they set about immediately to realize. Little Irish was with them, and Bill Smith, who had had other names at other times. And Sandy woke the next morning in a room that had no furniture but a bed, a washstand, a cracked mirror, and a chair. He did not remember coming there. Some one must have put him to bed. It was not Kid Sadler or Little Irish; they were drunk early, with bad judgment. It must have been Bill Smith. A hat with a frayed cord lay on the floor. "That's Bill's hat," he said. "He's got mine."
The gray morning filled the window, and carts rattled by in the street. He rose and drank from the pitcher to clear the bitterness from his mouth, and saw himself in the glass, haggard and holloweyed. It was a clean-cut face, with straight, thin lips, straight eyebrows, and brown hair. The lips were white and lines ran back from the eyes. Sandy did not think he looked a credit to himself.