horities who secured
reports that it did rain on that day.

Joe Blythe said that in that shack he met his brother, shabby,
desperate. Did the brother know that Joe was a soldier in the camp? Very
likely. Was he lying in wait for him in that secluded spot? That also
seems probable. That his brother attacked him, hitting him with an old
sash-weight, is certain. Who shall say what actually transpired between
these brothers in that lonely spot?

But the proven facts of Bob Haskell's career are these. He escaped from
Canada after committing burglary and a brutal murder. He tried at one
American recruiting station after another to find safety in military
service, and was rejected as unfit wherever he applied.

Neither Joe nor anyone else knows what was in the mind of this
defective, desperate, frantic wretch when he sought the neighborhood of
Camp Merritt. No one knows whether the horrible plan which he executed
had been previously conceived.

But this is certain, that he struck his brother on the head and laid him
low and took from him not only his uniform but his memory as well. One
thing he did not take, because he did not want it, and that was a little
trinket containing their mother's picture which Joe had always worn.

We may picture Joe Haskell lying in that dank, musty shack, bleeding,
unconscious, for hours. How long he lay there no man shall say. We may
picture him wandering forth, in an ill-fitting suit of civilian clothes,
demented, broken, dazed. Of his wanderings, likewise, who shall tell the
full truth? He visited a place called Blytheville and took the name of
Blythe. He visited great cities, so he said. He was in the west. He was
in jail for vagrancy. He watched some cows for a farmer. He remembered
nothing of his past. He was sheltered by the Salvation Army somewhere.
He was a wanderer over the country.

And so in time he wandered to New York. There he fell in with men who
were interested in demolishing the old camp. Probably they had no faith
in him. They did not reckon that he would fall in with a troop of scouts
who, in the good cause of pitying friendship, would make the old shacks
of the deserted reservation echo to the sound of their saws and hammers,
and the music of their merry laughter.

And the brother?

April in the terrible year of 1918 was the month of all months when
troops were sent abroad by the thousands, half equipped, untrained, as
fast as the speeding transports could carry them.