Connecticut western news., 1901-09-19
Why Tom Crowder
 Re=enliSted : :
By JOHN H. RAFFERTY.

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 Six months of soldering in the Phil ippines had taken all the edge off Tom Crowder's military ardor. In year the sight of khaki uniform hurt his eyes, and he began to realize that in all the world no village was so fair to look upon as Sugar Creek, Ills, the home town where Crowder & Sons kept store and where the event of each droning day was "traintime." When two years had almost passed, he began to dream of swinging under the elms in the old front yard at home and wondered as he nibbled at the everlasting hard tack how many pitted cherry pies he could eat at one sitting in the dining room at home.
 When a young soldiers mind begins to dwell on the pies that mother used to make, he cannot flourish on SOW belly. But when he begins to decorate his tent wall with the photographs of Tillie and Sue and "the folks" he's fit for nothing but furloughs and sick leave, and if there's anything of the quitter about him he's in imminent dan ger of forgetting to answer roll call some dark evening when the music of the sea beyond the jungle lures him with false songs of home. Tom heard the siren voice all right, but he didn't lure little bit. His term of enlistment was almost at an end, and he satis- fed himself with plotting each dull day off the calendar, writing doggerel verse about Tillie and making himself nui- sance generally to his bunkie.
 He used to swear roundly that he meant to hike back" to Sugar Creek as fast as ship and train could carry him, and hoped by all that was holy that once he was mustered out he'd never see a soldier again. He got to be the worst "knocker" in the con- pany, and he wrote so many letters that his comrades began to ask him why he didn't write few to himself.
 If you got such a good home and swell people, why don't some of 'em write to you?" sneered his tent mate one night. You can't be very strong with Tillie, or she'd write you at least once year"
 Now the latter question was sore one with Tom, because nobody wrote to him except his mother, and her let ters seldom reached him during the final months of his campaigning in the interior. He had quarreled with his brother so many times that no love was lost between them, and his father didn't write for the good reason that he didn't know how. As for Tillie, the young soldier had no reason to expect letters from her. When he left home, she was only Is, and his affair" with her was of the long distance, incoming, mental sort peculiar to boys and girls just out of high school. If Tom had been perfectly fair in his introspection,
 nothing very tangible in his hopes with regard to Tillie. He told himself a thousand times that she was "the one girl" and coddled himself with the
 belief that his fealty to her was little short of heroic, and that by some mys- terious telepathic sympathy she must
 by this time be pining away for his
 return.
 He wasn't "in love" when he enlist ed, but he had her picture and his
 mothers, and by a natural process of longing for home he developed quite fierce and yearning passion for Tillie A hundred times he began letter to
 her, but he never had the nerve to send 1t. He cut her initials on trees, fences and tent poles and wrote her
 name a dozen times on every scrap of paper that he could find. He sang it, spelled 1t and whistled 1t till his soul was In a fine frenzy, and he knew by
 heart the long speech of proposal that
 he meant to whisper into her little pink ear the first time he could get her
 alone in the swing or on the narrow seat of dads spring wagon.
 | So when Tom got back to Manila and
 regular mails he was stirred by an | unreasonable hope that there would | be at least one letter from T1llie. He | was disappointed, but not dishearten | cd, to find nothing but three old mis- | gives from his mother, in which there | was not a word of his hearts delight
 and volume of motherly advice about | the care he should take of himself, the | things he should eat and drink, the comrades he should avoid and the I prayers he should say. Her latest let ter was full of the time they would | rive him" when he got home, and it | concluded with the hint of great | surprise" that was in store for him. Of course that put new zest into his
 "hontnS for home" and his hatred for | the army rose in proportion.
 The whole town was at the station when Tom swung off the train steps at | Sugar Creek. The Silver Cornet band with old Bill Tomlinson, shako and all at It's head, was standing on the plat form playing "See, the Conquerine Hero Comes" Great flags waved above
 the depot, and yards of bunting stretch | ed clear across the street from Crow
 der's grocery store to the town hall | Tay,, al fan into tho rrna nf hfs