Binary input into a short?

Hey everyone, Im working on a lossy compression program for school over spring break here (great homework huh), and its quadtree compression of a picture in binary format. But the professor made up his own kind of picture format, with a .[1] extension and the first 4 bytes of the file are the dimensions of the picture followed by the rest of the picture data, where each byte represents a pixel. My dumb question is, how do I get those first 4 bytes (2 for rows, 2 for columns, which is why Im using shorts) into short variables? This is a really dumb question I know, I probably have some lame syntax bug somewhere but heres what I have:

short imgSizeRows;
short imgSizeCols;

fin.open( argv[1], ios::binary ); 
fin.read( (char*)&imgSizeRows, sizeof(imgSizeRows) );  
fin.read( (char*)&imgSizeCols, sizeof(imgSizeCols) ); 

 

Where imgSizeRows & imgSizeCols are private variables in the quadtree class. Right after I read in the dimensions I allocate a 2D array for the rest of the pixels and fill in that array, but for some reason the code above I always get 2''s for the two variables Any suggestions?