d, the
Canteen was always present with 'em; if they could git nothin' else
for their comfort, they could always git the cup that the Bible sez:
"Cursed is he that puts it to his neighbor's lips." Doubly cursed
now--poisoned with adulteration, makin' it a still more deadly pizen.

Well, sickened with loathsome food he could not eat, half starved, the
deadly typhoid hovering over the wretched soldier, is it any wonder
that as the tempter held the glass to his lips (the tempter being the
Government he wuz fightin' for) the tempted yielded and drank?

The letters Waitstill got grew shorter and cooler, as the tempter led
Alan deeper and deeper into his castle of Ruin where the demon sets
and gloats over its victims. When the Canteen had done its work on the
crazed brain and imbruted body, other sins and evils our Government
had furnished and licensed, stood ready to draw him still further
along the down-grade whose end is death.

Finally the letters stopped, and then Waitstill, whose heart wuz
broke, jined the noble army of nurses and went forward to the front,
always hunting for the one beloved, and, as she feared, lost to her.
And she found him. The very day that Alan Thorne, in a drunken brawl,
killed Arvilly's husband with a bullet meant for another drunken
youth, these wimmen met. A rough lookin' soldier knelt down by the
dead man, a weepin' woman fell faintin' on his still, dead heart; this
soldier ('twas Arville) wuz sick in bed for a week, Waitstill tendin'
him, or her I might as well say, for Arville owned to her in her
weakness that she wuz a woman; yes, Waitstill tended her faithfully,
white and demute with agony, but kep' up with the hope that the
Government that had ruined her lover would be lenient towards the
crime it had caused. For she reasoned it out in a woman's way. She
told Arvilly "that Alan would never have drank had not the Government
put the cup to his lips, and of course the Government could not
consistently condemn what it had caused to be." She reasoned it out
from what she had learnt of justice and right in the Bible.

But Arvilly told her--for as quick as she got enough strength she wuz
the same old Arvilly agin, only ten times more bent on fightin' aginst
the Drink Demon that murdered her husband. Sez Arvilly: "You don't
take into consideration the Tariff and Saloon arguments of apologizin'
Church and State, the tax money raised from dead men, and ruined
lives and broken hearts to support p