P. S. Medmangi writes that she has passed her exams and entered the Medical School. Sahwah is going to Business College and having the time of her life with shorthand. P.P.S. Hinpoha is dying of curiosity to hear more about the sick man. Please answer by return mail.
Nov. 1, 19—.
Dearest Winnies:
Well, Justice Sherman may be a sheep herder and a son of the pasture, but I hae me doots. I know a hawk from a handsaw if I was born and bred in the backwoods. I know it isn’t polite to doubt people’s word, and he seemed to be telling an absolutely straight story when he told how he beat his way across from Texas, but for all that there’s some mystery about him. His manners betrayed him the first time he ever sat down to the table with us. Even though he limped badly and was still awfully wobbly, he stood behind my mother’s chair and shoved it in for her and then hobbled over and did the same for me.
You can see it, can’t you? The table set in the kitchen—for our humble cot does not boast of a dining room—father and Jim Wiggin collarless and in their shirtsleeves, and the stranded sheep herder waiting upon mother and me as if we were queens. For no reason at all I suddenly became abashed. I felt my face flaming to the roots of my hair, and absentmindedly began to eat my soup with a fork, whereat Jim Wiggin set up a great thundering haw! haw! Jim had been a sheep herder before he came to take care of father’s horses, and it struck me forcibly just then that there was a wide difference between him and the stranger within our gates.
I said something to father about it that night when we were out in the stable together giving Sandhelo his nightly dole. Father rubbed his nose with the back of his hand, a sign that a thing is of no concern to him.
“Don’t you get to worryin’ about the stranger’s affairs,” he advised mildly. “If he’s got something he doesn’t want to tell, you ain’t got no business tryin’ to find it out. Tend to your own affairs, I say, and leave others’ alone. There ain’t nobody goin’ to be pestered with embarrassing questions while they’re under my roof.”
So I promised not to ask any questions. Just about the time the stranger’s foot was well enough to walk on, Jim Wiggin stepped on a rusty nail and laid himself up. Justice Sherman was a godsend just then because men were so hard to get, and father hired him to help with the horses until Jim was about again. Father begged me again at this time not to ask him anything about his past.
“Just as soon as he thinks we’re gettin’ curious he’ll up and leave,” he said, “and that would put us in a bad way. Help is so scarce now I don’t know where I would get an extra man. Seems almost as though the hand of Providence had sent him to us.”
It was perfectly true. Since so many men had gone into the army it was next thing to impossible to get any help on the farms except good-for-nothing negroes that weren’t worth their salt. It seemed, indeed, an act of Providence to cast an able man at our door just at this juncture. So I promised again not to bother the man with questions.
Indeed, it bade fair to be an easy matter not to ask him any questions. Beyond a few polite words at meals he never said anything at all, and as he had moved his sleeping quarters to a small cabin away from the house I saw very little of him, and I suppose we never would have gotten any better acquainted if your letter hadn’t come that Friday. Friday is the worst day of the week for me, because after five days of constant set-to-ing with Absalom Butts my philosophy is at its lowest ebb. This week was the worst because I had a visitation from the school board to see how I was getting on, and, of course, none of the pupils knew a thing and most of them acted as if the very devil of mischief had gotten into them. Elijah Butts gave me a solemn warning that I would have to keep better order if I wanted to stay in the school, and Absalom, who had been hanging around listening, made an impudent grimace at me and laughed in a taunting manner. If I hadn’t needed the money so badly I would have thrown up the job right there.
Then, on top of that, came your letter describing the supergorgeousness of your college rooms, and when I thought of the room I had planned to have at college this winter, adjoining yours, my heart turned to water within me and melancholy marked me for its own. I wept large and pearly tears which Niagara-ed over the end of my nose and sizzled on the hot stove, as I stood in the kitchen stirring a pudding for supper. Get the effect, do you? Me standing there with the spoon in one hand and your letter in the other, doing the Niobe act, quite oblivious to the fact that I was not the only person in the county. I was just in the act of swallowing a small rapid which had gotten side-tracked from the main channel and gone whirlpooling down my Sunday throat, when a voice behind me said, “Did you get bad news in your letter?”
I jumped so I dropped the letter right into the pudding. I made a savage dab at my eyes with the corner of my apron and wheeled around furiously. There stood the Justice Sherman person looking at me with his solemn black eyes. I was ready to die with shame at being caught.
“No, I didn’t,” I exploded, mopping my face vehemently with my apron, and thereby capping the climax. For while I had been reading your letter and absently stirring the pudding it had slopped over and run down the front of my apron, and, of course, I had to use just that part to wipe my face with. The pudding was huckleberry, and what it did to my features is beyond description. I caught one glimpse of myself in the mirror over the sink and then I sank down into a chair and just yelled. Justice Sherman doubled up against the door frame in a regular spasm of mirth, although he tried not to make much noise about it. Finally he bolted out of the door and came back with a basin of water from the pump, which he set down beside me.
“Here,” he said, “remove the marks of bloody carnage, before you scare the wolf from the door.”
So I scrubbed, wishing all the while that he would go away, and still furious for having made such a spectacle of myself. But he stayed around, and when I resembled a human being once more (if I ever could be said to resemble one), he came over and handed me the letter, which he had fished out of the pudding.
“Here’s the fatal missive,” he said, “or would you rather leave it in the pudding?”
“Throw it into the fire,” I commanded.
“That’s the right way,” he said approvingly. “I always burn bad news myself.”
“It wasn’t bad news,” I insisted.
“Then why the tears?” he inquired curiously. “Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean——”
He was smiling, but somehow I had a feeling that he was trying to cheer me up and not making fun of me. I was so low in my mind that afternoon that anyone who acted in the least degree sympathetic was destined to fall a victim. Before I knew it I had told him of my shipwrecked hopes and how your letter had opened the flood gates of disappointment and nearly put out the kitchen fire.
“College—you!” I heard him exclaim under his breath. He stared at me solemnly for a moment and then he exclaimed, “O tempora, O mores! What’s to hinder?”
“What’s to hinder?” I repeated blankly.
“Yes,” he said, “having the room anyway.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Why,” he explained, “you have a room of your own, haven’t you? Why don’t you fix it up just the way you had planned to have your room in college? Then you can go there and study and make believe you’re in college.”
I stared at him open-mouthed. “Make-believe has never been my long suit,” I said.
“Come on,” he urged. “I’ll help you fix it up. If you have any more tears prepare to shed them now into the paint pot and dissolve the paint.”
Before I knew what had happened we had laid forcible hands on the bare little cell I had indifferently been inhabiting all these years and transformed it into the study of my dreams. We cut a window in the side that faces in the direction of the mountains and made a corking window seat out of a packing case, on which I piled cushions stuffed with thistle down. We papered the whole place with light yellow paper, tacked up my last year’s school pennants and put up a book shelf. This last proved to be a delusion and a snare, because one end of it came down in the middle of the night not long afterward and all the books came tobogganing on top of me in bed. As a finishing touch, I brought out the snowshoes and painted paddle that were a relic of my Golden Age, and which I had never had the heart to unpack since I came home. When finished the effect was quite epic, though I suppose it would make Hinpoha’s artistic eye water.
Of course, it will never make up for not going to college, but it helped some, and in working at it I got very well acquainted with Justice Sherman all of a sudden. We had long talks about everything under the sun, and he continually bubbled over with funny sayings. He confided to me that he had never been so surprised in all his life as when I told him I wanted to go to college. You see, he had thought we were like the other poor whites in the neighborhood, and I was like the other girls he had seen. He didn’t take any interest in me until I bowled him over with the statement that I had already passed my college entrance exams.
All this time I never hinted that I suspected he was not the simple sheep herder he pretended to be. I had given father my word and, of course, had to keep it. But one afternoon the Fates had their fingers crossed, and Pandora like, I got my foot in it. I had driven Justice over to Spencer in the rattledy old cart with Sandhelo. On the way we talked of many things, and I came home surer than ever that he was no sheep herder. Once when the conversation lagged and in the silence Sandhelo’s heels seemed to be beating out a tune as they clicked along, I remarked ruminatingly, “There’s a line in Virgil that is supposed to imitate the sound of galloping horses.”
“Quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit angula campam,”
quoted Justice promptly.
So he was on quoting terms with Virgil! But I remembered my promise and made no remarks.
A little later I was telling about the winter hike we had taken on snowshoes last year.
“You ought to see the sport they have on snowshoes in Switzerland,” he began with kindling eyes. Then he broke off suddenly and changed the subject.
So Texas sheep herders learn their trade in Switzerland! But again I yanked on the curb rein of my curiosity. I apparently took no notice of his remark, for just then a negro stepped suddenly from behind the bushes along the road and startled Sandhelo so that he promptly became temperamental and sat up on his haunches to get a better look at the apparition, and the mess he made of the harness furnished us plenty of theme for conversation for the next ten minutes.
“Lord, what an ape,” remarked Justice, gazing after the departing form of the negro shambling along the road, “he looks like the things you see in nightmares.”
Accustomed as I was to seeing low-down niggers, this one struck me as being the worst specimen nature had ever produced. He had the features of a baboon, and the flapping rags of the grotesque garments he wore made him look like a wild creature.
“Do you have many such intellectual-looking gentlemen around here?” asked Justice, twisting his neck around for a final look at the fellow. “I’d hate to meet that professor at the dark of the moon.”
“Oh, they’re really not as bad as they look,” I replied. “They look like apes, but they’re quite harmless. They’re shiftless to the last degree, but not violent. They’re too lazy to do any mischief.”
“Just the same, I’d rather not get into an argument with that particular brother, if it’s all the same to you,” answered Justice. “He looks like mischief to me.”
“He doesn’t look like a prize entry in a beauty contest,” I admitted.
With all that talk about the negro Justice’s remark about Switzerland went unheeded, but I didn’t forget it just the same. I thought about it all the rest of the afternoon and it was as plain as the nose on your face that there was some mystery about Justice Sherman. A sheep herder who spouted Virgil at a touch, quoted continually from the classics, had refined manners and had traveled abroad, couldn’t hide his light under a bushel very well. Another thing; he wasn’t a Texan as he had led us to believe. He talked with the crisp, clear accent of the North, and the fuss he made about the negro in the road that afternoon betrayed the fact that he was no southerner. Nobody around here pays any attention to niggers, no matter how tattered they are. We’re used to them, but northerners always make a fuss.
The question bubbled up and down in my mind, keeping time to the bubbling of the soup on the stove; why was this educated and refined young man working for thirty dollars a month as a handy man around horses on a third-rate stock farm in this God-forsaken part of the country? Then a suspicion flashed into my mind and at the dreadful thought I stopped stirring with the upraised spoon frozen in mid-air. Then I gathered my wits together and started resolutely for the table. I had promised father I would never ask Justice Sherman anything about his past, but here was something that swept aside all personal obligations and promises. I found him with father in the stable working over a sick colt. I marched straight up to him and began without any preamble.
“See here, Justice Sherman,” I said, “are you hiding yourself to avoid military service? Are you a slacker?”
Justice Sherman straightened up and looked at me with flashing eyes. “No, I’m not!” he shouted in a voice quite unlike his.
I never saw anyone in such a rage. His face was as red as a beet and his hair actually stood on end. “I registered for the service,” he went on hotly, “and wasn’t called in the draft. I tried to enlist and they wouldn’t take me. I was under weight and had a weak throat. If anyone thinks I’m a slacker, I’ll——” Here he choked and had a violent coughing spell.
I stared at him, dazed. I never thought he could get so angry. He looked at me with hostile, indignant eyes. Then he straightened up stiffly and walked out of the stable.
“I won’t stay here any longer,” he exploded, still at the boiling point. “I won’t be insulted.”
“I apologize,” I said humbly. “I spoke in haste. Won’t you please consider it unsaid?”
No, he wouldn’t consider it unsaid. He wouldn’t listen to father’s pathetic plea not to leave him without a helper. We suspected him of being a slacker and that finished it. He would leave immediately. Down the road he marched as fast as he could go without ever turning his head.
A worm in the dust was much too exalted to describe the way I felt. With the best of intentions I had precipitated a calamity, taking away father’s best helper at a critical time, to say nothing of my losing him as a companion. I was too disgusted with myself to live and chopped wood to relieve my feelings. After supper I hitched up Sandhelo and drove to Spencer to post a letter. I am not in the least sentimental—you know that—but all along the road I kept seeing things that reminded me of Justice Sherman and the fun we had had together. Now that he was gone the days ahead of me seemed suddenly very empty, and desolation laid a firm hand on my ankle.
Also, I had an uncomfortable recollection that it was right along here we had met the horrid negro, and I became filled with fear that I would meet him again. The fear grew, and turned into absolute panic when I approached that same clump of bushes and in the dusk saw a figure rise from behind them and lurch toward the road. I pulled Sandhelo up sharply, thinking to turn around and flee in the opposite direction, but Sandhelo refused to be turned. When I pulled him up he sat back and mixed up the harness so he got the bit into his teeth, and then he jumped up and went straight on forward, with a squeal of mischief. When we were opposite the figure in the road Sandhelo stopped short and poked his nose forward just the way he used to do when Justice Sherman came into his stall.
“Hello,” said a voice in the darkness, and then I saw that the figure in the road was Justice Sherman. His bad ankle had given out on him and he had been sitting there on the ground waiting for some vehicle to come along and give him a lift to Spencer.
“Get in,” I said briefly, helping him up, and he got in beside me without a word. We drove to Spencer in silence and he made no move to get out when we got there. I mailed my letter and then turned and drove homeward. About half way home he spoke up and apologized for being so hasty, and wondered if father would take him back again. I reassured him heartily and we were on the old footing of intimacy by the time we reached home.
We found father standing in front of the house talking to a negro whom we recognized as the one we had met in the road that afternoon. Father greeted Justice Sherman with joy and relief.
“You pretty nearly came back too late,” he said. “Here I was just hiring a man to take your place.” Then he turned to the negro and said, “It’s all off, Solomon. I don’t need you. My own man has come back. You go along and get a job somewhere else.”
The negro shuffled off and I fancied that he looked rather resentful at being sent away.
“Father,” I said, when the creature was out of earshot, “you surely weren’t going to hire that ape to work here?”
“Why not?” answered father. “I have to have a man to help with the horses, and this fellow came up to the door and asked for work, so I promised him a job.”
“But he’s such a terrible looking thing,” I said.
Father only laughed and dismissed the subject with a wave of his hands. “I wasn’t hiring him for his looks,” he answered. “He said he could handle horses and that was enough for me.”
So Justice Sherman came back to us and the subject of military service was never broached again.
About a week after his return, and when Jim Wiggin was able to be about again, Justice Sherman walked into the kitchen with a mincing air quite unlike his ordinary free stride. He had been to Spencer for the mail.
“Tread softly when you see me,” he advised. “I’m a perfessor, I am.”
I looked up inquiringly from the potato I was paring.
“Behold in me,” he went on, “the entire faculty of the Spencer High School. I am instructor in Latin, Greek, mathematics, science, history, English and dramatics; also civics and economics.”
“You don’t mean really?” I asked.
“Really and truly, for sartain sure,” he repeated. “The last faculty got drafted and left the school in a bad way. I heard about it down at the post-office this afternoon and went over and applied for the job. The hardened warriors that compose the school board fell for me to a man. I recited one line of Latin and they applauded to the echo; I recited a line of gibberish and told them it was Greek, and they wept with delight at the purity of my accent. Then they cautiously inquired if I was qualified to teach any other branches and I told them that I also included in my repertoire cooking, dressmaking and millinery. This last remark was intended to be facetious, but those solemn old birds took it seriously and forthwith broke into loud hosannas. I was somewhat mystified at the outbreak until I gathered from bits of conversation that the extravagant township of Spencer had intended to hire two high school teachers this year, as the last incumbent’s accomplishments had been rather brief and fleeting, but what was the use, as one pious old hairpin by the name of Butts delicately put it, what was the use of paying two teachers when one feller could do the hull thing himself? Then he shook me feelingly by the hand and said he knowed I was a bargain the minute he laid eyes on me. O Tempora, O Mores! Papers were brought and shoved into my yielding hands, the writ duly executed, and I passed out of the door a fully fledged ‘perfessor’ with a six-months’ contract. Smile on me, please, I’m a bargain!” And he danced a hornpipe in the middle of the floor until the dishes rattled in the cupboard.
I stared at him speechless. He teach high school? And the things he mentioned as being able to teach! History, French, mathematics, physics, literature, philosophy, Latin, Greek! Quite a well-rounded sheep herder, this! The mystery about him deepened. It was clear now that he was a college graduate. Again I revised my estimate as to his age, and decided he must be about twenty-three or four. Why would he be willing to teach a farce of a high school like the one in Spencer?
Then in the midst of my puzzling it came over me that I did not want him to leave us, and that I would miss him terribly. Of course, he would go to live in Spencer.
“Are you going to board with any of the school board?” I asked jealously, that being what the last “faculty” had done.
“Board with the Board?” he repeated. “Neat expression, that. Not that I know of. I haven’t been requested to vacate my present quarters yet, or do I understand that you are even now serving notice?”
A thrill of joy shot through me. Maybe he would still live in the little cabin on our farm.
“I thought of course you would rather live near the school,” I said. “It’s six miles from here. Why don’t you?”
“‘I would dwell with thee, merry grasshopper,’” he quoted. “That is, if I am kindly permitted to do so.”
And so we settled it. He is to ride with Sandhelo in the cart every day as far as my school, then drive on to Spencer, and stop for me on the way home. What fun it is going to be!
Yours, summa cum felicitate,
P. S. Sandhelo sends three large and loving hee-haws.
Nov. 10, 19—.
Darling K:
This big old town is like the Deserted Village since you and the other Winnies went away. For the first few weeks it was simply ghastly; there wasn’t a tree or a telephone pole that didn’t remind me of the good times we used to have. Do you realize that I am the sole survivor of our once large and lusty crew? Migwan and Hinpoha and Gladys are at Brownell; Veronica is in New York; Nakwisi has gone to California with her aunt; Medmangi is in town, but she is locked up in a nasty old hospital learning to be a doctor in double quick time so she can go abroad with the Red Cross. Nothing is nice the way it used to be. I like to go to Business College, of course, and there are lots of pleasant girls there, but they aren’t my Winnies. I get invited to things, and I go and enjoy myself after a fashion, but the tang is gone. It’s like ice cream with the cream left out.
I went to the House of the Open Door one Saturday afternoon and poked around a bit, but I didn’t stay very long; the loneliness seemed to grab hold of me with a bony hand. Everything was just the way we had left it the night of our last Ceremonial Meeting—do you realize that we never went out after that? There was the candle grease on the floor where Hinpoha’s emotion had overcome her and made her hand wobble so she spilled the melted wax all out of her candlestick. There were the scattered bones of our Indian pottery dish that you knocked off the shelf making the gestures to your “Wotes for Wimmen” speech. There was the Indian bed all sagged down on one side where we had all sat on Nyoda at once.
It all brought back last year so plainly that it seemed as if you must everyone come bouncing out of the corners presently. But you didn’t come, and by and by I went down the ladder to the Sandwiches’ Lodge. That was just as bad as our nook upstairs. The gym apparatus was there, just as it used to be, with the mat on the floor where they used to roll Slim, and beside it the wreck of a chair that Slim had sat down on too suddenly.
Poor Slim! He tried to enlist in every branch of the service, but, of course, they wouldn’t take him; he was too fat. He starved himself and drank vinegar and water for a week and then went the rounds again, hoping he had lost enough to make him eligible, and was horribly cut up when he found he had gained instead. He was quite inconsolable for a while and went off to college with the firm determination to trim himself down somehow. Captain has gone to Yale, so he can be a Yale graduate like his father and go along with him to the class reunions. Munson McKee has enlisted in the navy and the Bottomless Pitt in the Ambulance Corps. The rest of the Sandwiches have gone away to school, too.
The boards creaked mournfully under my feet as I moved around, and it seemed to me that the old building was just as lonesome for you as I was.
“You ought to be proud,” I said aloud to the walls, “that you ever sheltered the Sandwich Club, because now you are going to be honored above all other barns,” and I hung in the window the Service Flag with the two stars that I had brought with me. It looked very splendid; but it suddenly made the place seem strange and unfamiliar. Here was something that did not belong to the old days. It is so hard to realize that the boys who used to wrestle around here have gone to war.
I went out and closed the door, but outside I lingered a minute to look sadly up at the little window in the end where the candle always used to burn on Ceremonial nights.
“Good-bye, House of the Open Door,” I said, “we’ve had lots of good times in you and nobody can ever take them away from us. We’ve got to stop playing now for awhile and Glorify Work. We’re going to do our bit, and you must do yours, too, by standing up proudly through all winds and weather and showing your service flag. Some day we’ll all come back to you, or else the Winnebago spirit will come back in somebody else, and you must be ready.”
I said good-bye to the House of the Open Door with the hand sign of fire and a military salute, and went away feeling a heavy sense of responsibility, because in all this big lonely city I was the only one left to uphold the honor of the Winnebagos.
And hoop-la! I did it, too, all by myself. The week after I had paid the visit to the House of the Open Door someone called me on the telephone and wanted to know if this was Miss Sarah Brewster who belonged to the Winnebago Camp Fire Girls, and when I said yes it was the voice informed me that she was Mrs. Lewis, the new Chief Guardian for the city, and President of the Guardians’ Association. She went on to say that she wanted to plan a patriotic parade for all the Camp Fire Girls in the city to take part in, and as part of the ceremony to present a large flag to the city. She knew what she wanted all right, but she wasn’t sure that she could carry it out, and as she had seen the Winnebagos the time they took part in the Fourth of July pageant, she wanted to know if we would take hold and help her manage the thing. I started to tell her that the Winnebagos weren’t here and couldn’t help her; then I reflected that I, at least, was left and it was up to me to do what you all would have done if you had been here. So I said yes, I’d be glad to take hold and help make the parade a success.
And, believe me, it was! Can you guess how many girls marched? Twenty-three hundred! Glory! I didn’t know there were so many girls in the whole world! The line stretched back until you couldn’t see the end, and still they kept on coming. And who do you suppose led the parade? Why, I did, of all people! And on a horse! Carrying the Stars and Stripes on a long staff that fitted into a contrivance on the saddle to hold it firm. Right in front of me marched the Second Regiment Band, and my horse pawed the ground in time to the music until I nearly burst with excitement. After me came the twenty girls, all Torch Bearers, who carried the big flag we were going to present to the city, and behind them came the floats and figures of the pageant.
I must tell you about some of these, and a few of them you’ll recognize, because they are our old stunts trimmed up to suit the occasion.
GIVE SERVICE was the most impressive, because it is the most important just now. It was in twelve parts, showing all the different ways in which Camp Fire Girls could serve the nation in the great crisis. There was the Red Cross Float, showing the girls making surgical dressings and knitting socks and sweaters. Another showed them making clothes for themselves and for other members of the family to cut down the hiring of extra help; and similar floats carried out the same idea in regard to cooking, washing and ironing. Yes ma’am! Washing and ironing! You don’t need to turn up your nose. One float was equipped with a complete modern household laundry and the girls on it had their sleeves rolled up to their elbows and were doing up fine waists and dresses in great shape, besides operating electric washing machines and mangles.
One float was just packed full of good things which the girls had cooked without sugar, eggs or white flour, and with fruits and vegetables which they had canned and preserved themselves, while the fertile garden in which said fruits and vegetables had grown came trundling on behind, the girls armed with spades, hoes and rakes. I consumed two sleepless nights and several strenuous afternoons accomplishing that garden on wheels and I want you to know it was a work of art. The plants were all artificial, but they looked most lifelike, indeed.
Besides those things we had groups of girls taking care of children so their mothers could go out and work; and teaching foreign girls how to take care of their own small brothers and sisters, so they’ll grow up strong and healthy.
There really seemed to be no end to our usefulness.
Behind the wheeled portion of the parade came hundreds of girls on foot, carrying pennants that stretched clear across the street, with clever slogans on them like this:
DON’T FORGET US, UNCLE SAMMY,
WE’RE ALWAYS ON THE JOB
* * * * * *
YOU’RE HERE BECAUSE WE’RE HERE
* * * * * *
AND THIS IS ONLY THE BEGINNING!
* * * * * *
WE ARE PROUD TO LABOR FOR OUR COUNTRY
And the people! Oh, my stars! They lined the streets for thirty blocks, packed in solid from the store fronts to the curb. And the way they cheered! It made shivers of ecstasy chase up and down my spine, while the tears came to my eyes and a big lump formed in my throat. If you’ve never heard thousands of people cheering at you, you can’t imagine how it feels.
One time when the procession halted at a cross street I saw a fat old man, who I’m sure was a dignified banker, balancing himself on a fireplug so he could see better, and waving his hat like crazy. He finally got so enthusiastic that he fell off the fireplug and landed on his hands and knees in the gutter, where some Boy Scouts picked him up and dusted him off, still feebly waving his hat.
Our line of march eventually brought us out at Lincoln Square, where the presentation of the flag was to take place. We stood in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial monument, and who do you suppose presented the flag? Me again. In the name of all the Camp Fire Girls of the city, I ceremoniously presented it to the Mayor, who accepted it with a flowery speech that beat mine all hollow. Besides presenting the flag I was to help raise it. The pole was there already; it had seen many flag raisings in its long career and many flags had flapped themselves to shreds on its top. The thing I had to do was fasten our flag to the ropes and pull her up. In this I was to be assisted by a soldier brother of one of the girls who was home on furlough. He was to be standing there at the pole waiting for us, but when the time came he wasn’t there. Where he was I hadn’t the slightest idea; nor did I have any time to spend wondering. Mrs. Lewis had set her heart on having a man in soldier’s uniform help raise the flag; it added so much to the spirit of the occasion. Just at this moment I saw a man in army uniform standing in the crowd at the foot of the monument, very close to me. Without a moment’s hesitation I beckoned him imperatively to me. He came and I thrust the rope into his hands, whispering directions as to what he was to do. It all went without a hitch and the crowd never knew that he wasn’t the soldier we had planned to have right from the start. We pulled evenly together and the flag slowly unfolded over our heads and went fluttering to the top, while the band crashed out the “Star Spangled Banner.” It was glorious! If I had been thrilled through before, I was shaken to my very foundations now. I felt queer and dizzy, and felt myself making funny little gaspy noises in my throat. There was a great cheer from the crowd and the ceremonies were over. The parade marched on to the Armory, where we were to listen to an address by Major Blanchard of the —th Engineers.
The girls had all filed in and found seats when Mrs. Lewis, who was to introduce Major Blanchard, came over to me where I was standing near the stage and said in a tragic tone, “Major Blanchard couldn’t come; I’ve had a telegram. What on earth are we going to do? He was going to tell stories about camp life; the girls will be so disappointed not to hear him.”
I rubbed my forehead, unable to think of anything that would meet the emergency. An ordinary speaker wouldn’t fill the bill at all, I knew, when the girls all had their appetites whetted for a Major.
“We might ask the band to give a concert, and all of us sing patriotic songs,” I ventured finally.
“I don’t see anything else to do,” said Mrs. Lewis, “but I’m so disappointed not to have the Major here. The girls are all crazy to hear about the camp.”
Just then I caught sight of a uniform outside of the open entrance way.
“Wait a minute,” I said, “there’s the soldier who helped us raise the flag, standing outside the door. Maybe he’ll come in and talk to the girls in place of the Major.” I hurried out and buttonholed the soldier. He declined at first, but I wouldn’t take no for an answer. I literally pulled him in and chased him up the aisle to the stage.
“But I can’t make a speech,” he said in an agonized whisper, as we reached the steps of the stage, trying to pull back.
“Don’t try to,” I answered cheerfully. “Speeches are horrid bores, anyway. Just tell them exactly what you do in camp; that’s what they’re crazy to hear about.”
Mrs. Lewis didn’t tell the audience that the speaker was one I had kidnapped in a moment of desperation. She introduced him as a friend of the Major’s, who had come to speak in his place. The applause when she introduced him was just as hearty as if he had been the Major himself. The fact that he was a soldier was enough for the girls.
And he brought down the house! He wasn’t an educated man, but he was very witty, and had the gift of telling things so they seemed real. He told little intimate details of camp life from the standpoint of the private as the Major never could have told them. He had us alternately laughing and crying over the little comedies and tragedies of barracks life. He imitated the voices and gestures of his comrades and mimicked the officers until you could see them as plainly as if they stood on the stage. He talked for an hour instead of the half hour the Major was scheduled to speak and when he stopped the air was full of clamorings for more. Private Kittredge had made more of a hit than Major Blanchard could have done.
I never saw a person look so astonished or so pleased as he did at the ovation which followed his speech. He stood there a moment, looking down at the audience with a wistful smile, then he got fiery red and almost ran off the stage.
“I don’t know whether to be glad or sorry the Major’s not coming,” whispered Mrs. Lewis to me under cover of the applause. “The Major’s a very fine speaker, but he wouldn’t have made such a human speech. You certainly have a knack of picking out able people, Miss Brewster! You chose just the right girls for each part in the pageant.”
I didn’t acknowledge this compliment as I should have, because I was wondering why our soldier man had looked that way when we applauded him. He would have slipped out of the side door when he came off the stage, but I stopped him and made him wait for the rest of the program. A national fraternity was holding a convention in town that week and members from all the great colleges were in attendance. As it happened, our Major is a member of that fraternity, and, as a mark of esteem for the Camp Fire Girls, he asked the fraternity glee club to sing for us at the close of our patriotic demonstration.
The singers came frolicking in from some banquet they had been attending, in a very frisky mood, and sang one funny song after another until our sides ached from laughing. I stole a glance now and then at Private Kittredge, beside me, but he never noticed. He was drinking in the antics of those carefree college boys with envious, wistful eyes. At the end of their concert the singers turned and faced the great flag that hung down at the back of the stage and sang an old college song that we had heard sung before, but which had suddenly taken on a new, deep meaning. With their very souls in their voices they sang it:
“Red is for Harvard in that grand old flag,
Columbia can have her white and blue;
And dear old Yale will never fail
To stand by her color true;
Penn and Cornell amid the shot and shell
Were fighting for that torn and tattered rag,
And our college cheer will be
‘My Country, ‘tis of Thee,’
And Old Glory will be our college flag!”
The effect was electrical. Everybody cheered until they were hoarse. I looked at Private Kittredge. His head was buried in his hands and the tears were trickling out between his fingers. I was too much embarrassed to say anything, and I just sat looking at him until, all of a sudden, he sat up, and reaching out his hand he caught hold of mine and squeezed it until it hurt.
“I’m going back,” he said brokenly.
“Going back?” I repeated, bewildered. “Where?”
“Back to camp,” he replied. Then he began to speak in a low, husky voice. “I want to tell you something,” he said. “I’m not what you think I am. I’m a deserter. That is, I would have been by tomorrow. My leave expires to-night. I wasn’t going back. I didn’t want to go into the army. I didn’t want to fight for the country. I hated the United States. It had never given me a square deal. My father was killed in a factory when I was a baby and my mother never got a cent out of it. She wasn’t strong and she worked herself to death trying to support herself and me. I grew up in an orphan asylum where everybody was down on me and made me do all the unpleasant jobs, and at twelve I was adrift in the world. I sold papers in the streets and managed to make a living, but one night I went out with a crowd of boys and some of the older ones knocked a man down and stole his money and the police caught the whole bunch and we were sent to the Reformatory. After that I had a hard time trying to make an honest living because people don’t like to hire anyone that’s been in the Reformatory. I never had any fun the way other boys did. I had to live in cheap boarding places because I didn’t earn much and nobody that was decent seemed to care to associate with me. I was sick of living that way and wanted to go away to South America where no one would know about the Reformatory, and make a clean start. Then I was drafted. I hated army life, too. All the other fellows got mail and boxes from home and had a big fuss made over them and I didn’t have a soul to write to me or send me things. I was given a good deal of kitchen duty to do and everybody looks down on that. I kept getting sorer and sorer all the time and at last I decided to desert. I got a three-days’ leave and made up my mind that I wouldn’t go back. I was just hanging around the street killing time this afternoon when I saw a crowd and stopped to see what the excitement was about. Then all of a sudden you looked at me and motioned me to come over and help you raise the flag. It was the first time I had ever touched the Stars and Stripes. When the folds fell around my shoulders before she went sailing up, something wakened in me that I had never felt before. I couldn’t believe it was I, standing there raising the flag with all those people cheering. It intoxicated me and carried me along with the parade when it went to the armory. Then again, like the hand of fate, you came out and pulled me in and made me speak to the girls. I had never spoken before anyone in my life. I had never ‘been in’ anything. It made another man of me. All of a sudden I found I did love my country after all. I did have something to fight for. I did belong somewhere. It did thrill me to see Old Glory fluttering out in the wind. That was my country’s flag, my flag. I was willing to die for it. I’m going back to camp to-night,” he finished simply.
I gripped his hands silently, too moved to speak.
All the while we were talking there the crowd had been busy getting their things together and going out and nobody paid any attention to us sitting there in the shadow under the gallery. Now, however, I was aware of somebody approaching directly, and along came the Mayor, gracious and smiling, to shake hands with the speaker of the afternoon.
“Those were rattling good stories you told,” he said in his hearty way. “I say, won’t you be a guest at a little dinner the frat brothers are giving this evening, and tell them to the boys? That’s the kind of stuff everybody’s interested in.”