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But not Anastasia Rourke. Early the first morning of a two-week job on the new plant of the Western Castings Company, Chet Ball, glancing down from his dizzy perch atop an electric-light pole, espied Miss Anastasia Rourke going to work. He didn’t know her name or anything about her, except that she was pretty. You could see that from a distance even more remote than Chet’s. But you couldn’t know that Stasia was a lady not to be trifled with. We know her name was Rourke, but he didn’t.

So then: “Hoo-hoo!” he had called. “Hello, sweetheart! Wait for me and I’ll be down.”

Stasia Rourke had lifted her face to where he perched so high above the streets. Her cheeks were five shades pinker than was their wont, which would make them border on the red.

“You big ape, you!” she called, in her clear, crisp voice. “If you had your foot on the ground you wouldn’t dast call to a decent girl like that. If you were down here I’d slap the face of you. You know you’re safe up there.”

The words were scarcely out of her mouth before Chet Ball’s sturdy legs were twinkling down the pole. His spurred heels dug into the soft pine of the pole with little ripe, tearing sounds. He walked up to Stasia and stood squarely in front of her, six feet of brawn and brazen nerve. One ruddy cheek he presented to her astonished gaze. “Hello, sweetheart,” he said. And waited. The Rourke girl hesitated just a second. All the Irish heart in her was melting at the boyish impudence of the man before her. Then she lifted one hand and slapped his smooth cheek. It was a ringing slap. You saw the four marks of her fingers upon his face. Chet straightened, his blue eyes bluer. Stasia looked up at him, her eyes wide. Then down at her own hand, as if it belonged to somebody else. Her hand came up to her own face. She burst into tears, turned, and ran. And as she ran, and as she wept, she saw that Chet was still standing there, looking after her.

Next morning, when Stasia Rourke went by to work, Chet Ball was standing at the foot of the pole, waiting.

They were to have been married that next June. But that next June Chet Ball, perched perilously on the branch of a tree in a small woodsy spot somewhere in France, was one reason why the American artillery in that same woodsy spot was getting such a deadly range on the enemy. Chet’s costume was so devised that even through field glasses (made in Germany) you couldn’t tell where tree left off and Chet began.

Then, quite suddenly, the Germans got the range. The tree in which Chet was hidden came down with a crash, and Chet lay there, more than ever indiscernible among its tender foliage.

Which brings us back to the English garden, the yellow chicken, Miss Kate, and the letter.

His shattered leg was mended by one of those miracles of modern war surgery, though he never again would dig his spurred heels into the pine of a G. L. & P. Company pole. But the other thing–they put it down under the broad general head of shock. In the lovely English garden they set him to weaving and painting as a means of soothing the shattered nerves. He had made everything from pottery jars to bead chains, from baskets to rugs. Slowly the tortured nerves healed. But the doctors, when they stopped at Chet’s cot or chair, talked always of “the memory center.” Chet seemed satisfied to go on placidly painting toys or weaving chains with his great, square-tipped fingers–the fingers that had wielded the pliers so cleverly in his pole-climbing days.

“It’s just something that only luck or an accident can mend,” said the nerve specialist. “Time may do it–but I doubt it. S
ometimes just a word– the right word–will set the thing in motion again. Does he get any letters?”