," the editor turned to him.
"All men in the age must do that."

"But how about the second camp?"

"There's some talk of taking no men in the second camp who are in the
draft age. Youngsters like you are wanted for the rank and file."

Mr. Strong turned to his desk and began opening mail, else he might have
read Jeb's secret at a glance. The Colonel, blissfully ignorant, leaned
over the ledger and began for the hundredth time to check off the
extinct roster, saying with resignation:

"That sounds reasonable, Amos; and, since there's no odium attached to a
drafted man, it may be all the greater achievement in the long run when
Jeb has worked himself up from the ranks. He'll be a better officer for
it."

"When is this registration?" Jeb tried to make his voice sound natural.

"Next Tuesday," Mr. Strong answered over his shoulder. The Colonel was
still preoccupied and did not look up. The next moment Jeb slipped out
and turned, dizzily, into Main street.

CHAPTER VI

For the remainder of that week Jeb was an ill man. He could neither eat
nor sleep, but paced restlessly about the garden, sometimes going far
into the country and coming home exhausted. He did not realize that his
panic-stricken mind was showing signs of its agony, or that his aunts
were becoming greatly alarmed. But Sunday morning Miss Sallie and Miss
Veemie held a consultation and decided to call Doctor Purdy--a gruff,
good-natured friend of the family, who not infrequently dropped in for a
cup of tea. This time he found his patient in the garden and was soon
walking arm in arm with him. Later he rejoined the ladies on the front
porch.

"Is it serious?" they asked, in a breath.

"Um," he answered, pursing his lips and looking out across the lawn,
"no."

They did not suspect that Doctor Purdy was utterly in the dark about
Jeb's ailment; nor that in a general way he had diagnosed it to be love
or debt, judging solely from a very evident depression. Neither did the
man of medicine guess how dangerously ill in mind his patient had
become; for Jeb, in the darkest hours of these days, during which he was
imminently faced with conscription--meaning to him a hell of hells in a
foreign battlefield--had so worked himself into an hysteria that
personal injury seemed the easiest and only solution to his suffering.
Were he to shoot off his finger, for instance, he would not be drafted!
He had read of this being done in other countries! Or, he might