The Washington herald., 1915-10-10

farther down the hall was the girls room. which
they used to powder up in. and so forth. Down
stairs we-that is. the San Augustine Social Co.
tillion and Merrymakers' Club-had a stretcher
put down in the parlor where our dance was
going on.
Willie Robbins and me happened to be up
in our-cloak-room. believe we called it
when Myra Allison skipped through the hall on
her way downstairs from the girls room Willie
was standing before the mirror. deeply inter-
ested in smoothing down the blond grass-plot
on his head, which seemed to give him lots of
trouble. Myra was always full of life and
devilment. She stopped and stuck her head in
our door. She certainly was good looking.
But | knew how Joe Cranberry stood with her.
So did Willie; but he kept on ba-a-a-ing after
her and following her around He had system
of persistence that didn' coincide with pale hair
and light eyes.
Hello, Willie! says Myra What are you
doing to yourself in the glass;
I'm trying to look fly says Willie.
Well, you never could be fly. says Myra.
with her special laugh which was the pro-
vokingest sound ever heard except the rattle
OF an empty canteen against my saddle-horn.
i looked around at Willie after Myra had
gone. He had kind of hIy-white look on
him which seemed to show thai her remark had.
as you might say disrupted his soul. never
noticed anything in what she said that sounded
particularly destructive to mans ideas of self
consciousness; but he was set back to an extent
you could scarcely imagine
After we went downstairs with our clean
collars or, Willie never went near Myra again
that night. After all, he seemed to be diluted
kind of skim-mik sort of a chap, and never
wondered that Joe Cranberry beat him out.
The next day the batleship Maine was
blown up, and then pretty soon somebody-I
reckon it was Joe Bailey. or Ben TiIman, or
maybe the Government-decaredw war against
Spain.
We'll. every body south of Mason & Ham
lin line knew that the North by itself couldn't
whip whole country the size of Spain. So the
Yankees commenced to holler for help. and the
Johnny Rebs answered the call We're COM
ing. Father William. hundred thousand strong
and then some. was the way they sang it.
And the old party lines drawn by Shcrman's
march and the kuklux and innocent cotton and
the Jim Crow street-car ordinances faded away.
We became one undivided country. with no
North. very little East. good-sized chunk of
West, and South that loomed UP as big as the
first foreign label on new eight dollar suit
case.
''Of course the dogs of war weren't a com
plete pack without yelp from the San Angus
tine Rifles. Company D. of the Fourteenth
Texas Regiment. Our company was among the
first to land in Cuba and strike terror into the
hearts of the foe I'm not going to give YOU
history of the war; I'm just dragging it in TO fill
out my story about Willie Robbins, Just as the
Republican party dragged it in to help out the
election In 1898
IF anybody ever had heroitis. it was that
Willie Robbins From the minute he set foot
on the soil of the tyrants of CASTLE he seemed
10 engulf danger as cat laps up cream. He
certainly astonlshed every man in our company,
from the captain up. You'd have expected him
to gravitate naturally to the job of an orderly
to the colonel, or typewriter in the commissary
but not any. He created the part of the
Aaxen-hared boy hero who lives and gets back
home with the goods, instead of dying with an
important despatch in his hands at his coIoners
feet.
Our company got into section of Cuban
scenery where one of the messiest and most
unsung portions of the campaign occurred. We
were out every day capering around in the
bushes. and having little skirmishes with the
Spanish troops that looked more like kind of
tired-out feuds than anything else. The war
was joke to us. and of no interest to them
We never could see it any other way than as
bowling farce-comedy that the San Augustine
Rifles were actually fighting to uphold the Stars
and Stripes. And the blamed little senors didn't
get enough pay to make them care whether
they were patriots or traitors Now and then
somebody would get killed. 1t seemed like
waste of life TO me I was at Coney JsI,,J