New Ulm review., 1901-10-16
Why Tom Crowder
Re=enlisted
By JOHN H. RAFFERTY,.

).
.i..ss.sss-sss 91+s-s
Six months Of soldering in the Phil
| ippines had taken all the edge off Tom
| CroWder's military ardor. In year
the sight of a 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
gutter 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 salts
|
| fed himself with blottfng 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 COM
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 a 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
J interior. He had quarreled with his
brother so many times that no love
| 10c4 J,.c5vr Il I,so e
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 16 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,
he must have admitted that there was
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.
Re wasn't sin 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 a
fierce and yearning passion for Ti1lie
a hundred times he began a letter to
her, but he never had the nerve to
| send it. He cut her initials on frees
fences and tent poles and wrote her
name dozen times on every scrap of
paper that he could find He sang it,
| spelled it and whistled it 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 Tfllie. He
was disappointed, but not dishearten-
| ed, to find nothing but three old mis-
sives from his mother, in which there
was not word Of his hearts delight
| and a 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
prayers he should say. Her latest let
ter was full of the '.time they would
give him. when he got home, and it
concluded with the hint of a great