ed to show that her remark had, as
you might say, disrupted his soul. I never noticed anything in what
she said that sounded particularly destructive to a man's ideas
of self-consciousness; but he was set back to an extent you could
scarcely imagine.

"After we went down-stairs with our clean collars on, Willie never
went near Myra again that night. After all, he seemed to be a diluted
kind of a skim-milk sort of a chap, and I never wondered that Joe
Granberry beat him out.

"The next day the battleship _Maine_ was blown up, and then pretty soon
somebody--I reckon it was Joe Bailey, or Ben Tillman, or maybe the
Government--declared war against Spain.

"Well, everybody south of Mason & Hamlin's line knew that the North
by itself couldn't whip a whole country the size of Spain. So the
Yankees commenced to holler for help, and the Johnny Rebs answered the
call. 'We're coming, Father William, a hundred thousand strong--and
then some,' was the way they sang it. And the old party lines drawn
by Sherman's march and the Kuklux and nine-cent cotton and the Jim
Crow street-car ordinances faded away. We became one undivided.
country, with no North, very little East, a good-sized chunk of West,
and a South that loomed up as big as the first foreign label on a new
eight-dollar suit-case.

"Of course the dogs of war weren't a complete pack without a yelp from
the San Augustine Rifles, Company D, of the Fourteenth Texas Regiment.
Our company was among the first to land in Cuba and strike terror
into the hearts of the foe. I'm not going to give you a history of
the war, I'm just dragging it in to fill out my story about Willie
Robbins, just as the Republican party dragged it in to help out the
election in 1898.

"If anybody ever had heroitis, it was that Willie Robbins. From the
minute he set foot on the soil of the tyrants of Castile he seemed to
engulf danger as a cat laps up cream. He certainly astonished every
man in our company, from the captain up. You'd have expected him
to gravitate naturally to the job of an orderly to the colonel, or
typewriter in the commissary--but not any. He created the part of
the flaxen-haired boy hero who lives and gets back home with the
goods, instead of dying with an important despatch in his hands at
his colonel's feet.

"Our company got into a section of Cuban scenery where one of the
messiest and most unsung portions of the campaign occurred. We were
out every day capering around in the