you get properly fixed up."

"Chance of a lifetime, Jeb," the Colonel enthusiastically cried.
"Training, commission, fighting with the first contingent that goes
over! I congratulate you, sir!"

"But--but what about the company?" he faltered, feeling the world wobble
and reel.

"Company the devil, sir! Amos and I don't believe the Department intends
sending us the stuff! No, sir, they've doubtless settled on this other
scheme."

Only for a moment did Job hesitate, and then he arose supreme. His face
was white, his eyes blazed as fire, his voice became pinched and high
with emotion. Never, he declared, would he turn back from the duty
toward which he had set his will! That duty was to his comrades in
Hillsdale, who had paid him the high compliment of dedicating their
lives to his leadership. Desert them now, when the first opportunity
came for personal advancement, and he would be a traitor to all mankind!
If, merely for the love of fighting, he could so far forget these
confiding fellows, how could he ever look them in the eyes again!

The truth of the matter was that Jeb worked himself into a frenzy of
oratory which convinced in spite of logic. He was pleading desperately
for Jeb, for Jeb's hide, for Jeb's life. Having no suspicion of this the
two old gentlemen listened with rapture expressed in their moistening
eyes, and when he concluded, out of breath but defiant, they sprang up
and embraced him.

"By gad, sir," the Colonel cried, "you made the shades of eloquence,
from Webster to Demosthenes, sit up and cock their ears! Amos, when this
war's over we'll run him for the senate, eh?"

So the Officers' Reserve Corps was laid upon the shelf. Other men in
Hillsdale applied for it; some were ordered to report at the training
camp of their divisional area; but, for Jeb, the dark angel of torture
had again passed by.

At breakfast one morning, opening the _Eagle_, his blood congealed into
fine particles of ice. His head whirled, his body became sick in every
part. Leaving abruptly he went into the garden and there read, painfully
read, the big headlines and their accompanying story.

The draft! Drafting between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one--and
he was twenty-six! He could not have been more in the center, in the
very bull's-eye, of the age selection! With all his senses in a panic,
his mind darted this way and that, seeking, as a trapped rat, some
avenue of exit; but on every side, so far as years count