An hour before dawn Cash Wyble was led before his sleepy and unloving company commander. The returned wanderer was caked with dirt and blood. His face was scored by briers. Across one cheek ran the red wale of a bullet. A very creditable flesh wound adorned his left shoulder. His clothes were in ribbons.
Before the captain could frame the first of a thousand scathing words Cash broke out pantingly: “Stick me in the hoosgow if you’re a mind to, Cap! Stick me there for life. Or wish me onto a kitchen-police job forever! I’m not kickin’. It’s comin’ to me, all right, arter what I done.
“I git the drift of the hull thing now. I’m onter what it means. It—it means Old Glory! It means—_this!_”
He stuck out one muddy hand wherein was clutched a wad of scratch-pad paper.
Then the company commander did a thing that stamped him as a genius. Instead of administering the planned rebuke and following it by sending the wretch to the guard house he began to ask questions.
“What do you make of it all?” dazedly queried the captain of Top Sergeant Mahan when Cash had been taken to the trench hospital to have his shoulder dressed.
“Well, sir,” reported Mahan meditatively, “for one thing, I take it, we’ve got a new soldier in the company. A soldier, not a varmint. For another thing, I take it, Uncle Sam’s got a new American on his list of nephews. And—and, unless I’m wrong, Kaiser Bill is short one crackajack sniper and one perfectly good Prussian colonel too. War’s a funny thing, sir.”
The President of the United States was speaking. His audience comprised two thousand foreign-born men who had just been admitted to citizenship. They listened intently, their faces, aglow with the light of a new-born patriotism, upturned to the calm, intellectual face of the first citizen of the country they now claimed as their own.
Here and there among the newly made citizens were wives and children. The women were proud of their men. They looked at them from time to time, their faces showing pride and awe.
One little woman, sitting immediately in front of the President, held the hand of a big, muscular man and stroked it softly. The big man was looking at the speaker with great blue eyes that were the eyes of a dreamer.