a detached impersonal air at the front of the Summit
roadster, there approached him a recruiting sergeant.

"How about joining up this morning?" he inquired briskly.

"Oh, I don't know," the young man responded casually. "I hadn't thought
about it."

"Every man should be thinking about it," the sergeant declared. "The
army needs men. Now a well-set-up young fellow like you would get on
capitally at soldiering. It's a great life. When we get the Germans
whipped every man will be proud to say he had a hand in it. If a man
struck you you wouldn't stand back and let some other fellow do your
fighting for you, now would you? More than that, between you and me, it
won't be long before an able-bodied man can't walk these streets in
civvies, without the girls hooting him. It's a man's duty to get into
this war. Better walk along with me to headquarters and sign on."

The young man gazed across the street with the same immobility of
expression.

"What's the inducement?" he asked presently.

The sergeant, taking his cue from this, launched forth upon a glowing
description of army life, the pay, the glory, the manifold advantages
that would certainly accrue. He painted a rosy picture, a gallant
picture. One gathered from his talk that a private in khaki was greater
than a captain of industry in civilian clothes. He dwelt upon the
brotherhood, the democracy of arms. He spilled forth a lot of the
buncombe that is swallowed by those who do not know from bitter
experience that war, at best, is a ghastly job in its modern phases, a
thing that the common man may be constrained to undertake if need
arises, but which brings him little pleasure and less glory--beyond the
consciousness that he has played his part as a man should.

The young man heard the recruiting sergeant to an end. And when that
worthy had finished he found fixed steadily upon him a pair of coldly
speculative gray-green eyes.

"How long have you been in the army?" he asked.

"About eighteen months," the sergeant stated.

"Have you been over there?"

"No," the sergeant admitted. "I expect to go soon, but for the present
I'm detailed to recruiting."

The young man had a flower in the lapel of his coat. He removed it, the
flower, and thrust the lapel in the sergeant's face. The flower had
concealed a bronze button.

"I've been over there," the young man said calmly. "There's my button,
and my discharge is in my pocket--with the names of places on it that
y