ting when the chicken was completed. Miss Kate was at the
other end of the sunny garden walk, bending over a wheel-chair. So Chet
went on painting, placidly. One by one, with meticulous nicety, he
painted all his finger nails a bright and cheery yellow. Then he did the
whole of his left thumb, and was starting on the second joint of the
index finger when Miss Kate came up behind him and took the brush gently
from his strong hands.

"You shouldn't have painted your fingers," she said.

Chet surveyed them with pride. "They look swell."

Miss Kate did not argue the point. She put the freshly painted wooden
chicken on the table to dry in the sun. Her eyes fell upon a letter
bearing an American postmark and addressed to Sergeant Chester Ball,
with a lot of cryptic figures and letters strung out after it, such as
A.E.F. and Co. 11.

"Here's a letter for you!" She infused a lot of Glad into her voice. But
Chet only cast a languid eye upon it and said, "Yeh?"

"I'll read it to you, shall I? It's a nice fat One."

Chet sat back, indifferent, negatively acquiescent. And Miss Kate began
to read in her clear young voice, there in the sunshine and scent of the
centuries-old English garden.

It marked an epoch in Chet's life--that letter. But before we can
appreciate it we'll have to know Chester Ball in his Chicago days.

Your true lineman has a daredevil way with the women, as have all men
whose calling is a hazardous one. Chet was a crack workman. He could
shinny up a pole, strap his emergency belt, open his tool kit, wield his
pliers with expert deftness, and climb down again in record time. It was
his pleasure--and seemingly the pleasure and privilege of all lineman's
gangs the world over--to whistle blithely and to call impudently to any
passing petticoat that caught his fancy.

Perched three feet from the top of the high pole he would cling,
protected, seemingly, by some force working in direct defiance of the
law of gravity. And now and then, by way of brightening the tedium of
their job he and his gang would call to a girl passing in the street
below, "Hoo-Hoo! Hello, sweetheart!"

There was nothing vicious in it, Chet would have come to the aid of
beauty in distress as quickly as Don Quixote. Any man with a blue shirt
as clean, and a shave as smooth, and a haircut as round as Chet Ball's
has no meanness in him. A certain dare-deviltry went hand in hand with
his work--a calling in which a careless load dispatcher,