-sleeves, with no collar
on, and no signs of a shave, trying to scrape out a hole among the
brickbats and tin cans to plant a little fruit-tree in. He looked up
but never said a word, and neither did Myra.

"Willie was sure dandy-looking in his uniform, with medals strung on
his breast and his new gold-handled sword. You'd never have taken him
for the little white-headed snipe that the girls used to order about
and make fun of. He just stood there for a minute, looking at Myra
with a peculiar little smile on his face; and then he says to her,
slow, and kind of holding on to his words with his teeth:

"'_Oh, I don't know! Maybe I could if I tried!_'

"That was all that was said. Willie raised his hat, and we walked
away.

"And, somehow, when he said that, I remembered, all of a sudden,
the night of that dance and Willie brushing his hair before the
looking-glass, and Myra sticking her head in the door to guy him.

"When we got back to Sam Houston Avenue, Willie says:

"'Well, so long, Ben. I'm going down home and get off my shoes and
take a rest.'

"'You?' says I. 'What's the matter with you? Ain't the court-house
jammed with everybody in town waiting to honor the hero? And two
brass-bands, and recitations and flags and jags and grub to follow
waiting for you?'

"Willie sighs.

"'All right, Ben,' says he. 'Darned if I didn't forget all about
that.'

"And that's why I say," concluded Ben Granger, "that you can't tell
where ambition begins any more than you can where it is going to wind
up."

THE HEAD-HUNTER

When the war between Spain and George Dewey was over, I went to the
Philippine Islands. There I remained as bush-whacker correspondent
for my paper until its managing editor notified me that an
eight-hundred-word cablegram describing the grief of a pet carabao
over the death of an infant Moro was not considered by the office to
be war news. So I resigned, and came home.

On board the trading-vessel that brought me back I pondered much
upon the strange things I had sensed in the weird archipelago of the
yellow-brown people. The manoeuvres and skirmishings of the petty war
interested me not: I was spellbound by the outlandish and unreadable
countenance of that race that had turned its expressionless gaze upon
us out of an unguessable past.

Particularly during my stay in Mindanao had I been fascinated and
attracted by that delightfully original tribe of heathen known as
the head-hunters. Tho