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“Naw, I can’t to-night. I’m busy.”

And then the steel edge cut. “Buzz, if you turn me down I’ll have you up.”

“Up?”

“Before old Colt. I can fix up charges. He’ll believe it. Say, he knows me, Judge Colt does. I can name you an’–“

“Me!” Sheer amazement rang in his voice. “Me? You must be crazy. I ain’t had anything to do with you. You make me sick.”

“That don’t make any difference. You can’t prove it. I told you I was crazy about you. I told you–“

He jerked loose from her then and was off. He ran one block. Then, after a backward glance, fell into a quick walk that brought him past the Brill House and to Schroeder’s drug store corner. There was his crowd–Spider, and Red, and Bing, and Casey. They took him literally unto their breasts. They thumped him on the back. They bestowed on him the low epithets with which they expressed admiration. Red worked at one of the bleaching vats in the Hatton paper mill. The story of Buzz’s fistic triumph had spread through the big plant like a flame.

“Go on, Buzz, tell ’em about it,” Red urged, now. “Je’s, I like to died laughing when I heard it. He must of looked a sight, the poor boob. Go on, Buzz, tell ’em how you says to him he must be a kind of delicate piece of–you know; go on, tell ’em.”

Buzz hitched himself up with a characteristic gesture, and plunged into his story. His audience listened entranced, interrupting him with an occasional “Je’s!” of awed admiration. But the thing seemed to lack a certain something. Perhaps Casey put his finger on that something when, at the recital’s finish he asked:

“Didn’t he see you was goin’ to hit him?”

“No. He never see a thing.”

Casey ruminated a moment. “You could of give him a chanst to put up his dukes,” he said at last. A little silence fell upon the group. Honour among thieves.

Buzz shifted uncomfortably. “He’s a bigger guy than I am. I bet he’s over six foot. The papers was always telling how he played football at that college he went to.”

Casey spoke up again. “They say he didn’t wait for this here draft. He’s goin’ to Fort Sheridan, around Chicago somewhere, to be made a officer.”

“Yeh, them rich guys, they got it all their own way,” Spider spoke up, gloomily. “They–“

From down the street came a dull, muffled thud-thud-thud-thud. Already Chippewa, Wisconsin, had learned to recognise it. Grand Avenue, none too crowded on this mid-week night, pressed to the curb to see. Down the street they stared toward the moving mass that came steadily nearer. The listless group on the corner stiffened into something like interest.

“Company G,” said Red. “I hear they’re leavin’ in a couple of days.”

And down the street they came, thud-thud-thud, Company G, headed for the new red-brick Armory for the building of which they had engineered everything from subscription dances and exhibition drills to turkey raffles. Chippewa had never taken Company G very seriously until now. How could it, when Company G was made up of Willie Kemp, who clerked in Hassell’s shoe store; Fred Garvey, the reporter on the Chippewa Eagle; Hermie Knapp, the real-estate man, and Earl Hanson who came around in the morning for your grocery order.

Thud-thud-thud-thud. And to Chippewa, standing at the curb, quite suddenly these every-day men and boys were transformed into something remote and almost terrible. Something grim. Something sacrificial. Something sacred.

Thud-thud-thud-thud. Looking straight ahead.

“The poor boobs,” said Spider, and spat, and laughed.

The company passed on down the street–vanished. Grand Avenue went its way.

A little silence fell upon the street-corner group. Bing was the first to speak.

“They won’t git me in this draft. I got a mother an’ two kid sisters to support.”

“Yeh, a swell lot of supportin’ you do!”

“Who says I don’t! I can prove it.”

“They’ll get me all right,” said Casey. “I ain’t kickin’.”