rations Stretchy acted as his own lookout, and a
highly competent one he was, too, with a preference for lurking in
areaways while his lieutenants carried forward the more arduous but less
responsible shares of the undertaking.

In the darkness behind Ginsburg where he crouched a long gorilla's arm
of an arm reached outward and downward, describing an arc. You might
call it the long arm of coincidence and be making no mistake either. At
the end of the arm was a fist and in the fist a length of gas pipe
wrapped in rags. This gas pipe descended upon the back of Ginsburg's
skull, crushing through the derby hat he wore. And the next thing
Ginsburg knew he was in St. Vincent's Hospital with a splitting headache
and the United States Government had gone to war against the German
Empire.

Ginsburg did not volunteer. The parent who once had wielded the
disciplinary strap-end so painstakingly had long since rejoined his
bearded ancestors, but there was a dependent mother to be cared for and
a whole covey of younger brothers and sisters to be shepherded through
school and into sustaining employment. So he waited for the draft, and
when the draft took him and his number came out in the drawing, as it
very soon did, he waived his exemptions and went to training camp
wearing an old suit of clothes and an easy pair of shoes. Presently he
found himself transferred to a volunteer outfit--one of the very few
draft men who were to serve with that outfit.

In camp the discipline he had acquired and the drilling he had done in
his prentice days on the force stood him in good stead. Hard work
trimmed off of him the layers of tissue he had begun to take on; plain
solid food finished the job of unlarding his frame. Shortly he was
Corporal Ginsburg--a trim upstanding corporal. Then he became Sergeant
Ginsburg and soon after this was Second Sergeant Ginsburg of B Company
of a regiment still somewhat sketchy and ragged in its make-up, but with
promise of good stuff to emerge from the mass of its material. When his
regiment and his division went overseas, First Sergeant Ginsburg went
along too.

The division had started out by being a national guard division; almost
exclusively its rank and file had been city men--rich men's sons from
uptown, poor men's sons with jaw-breaking names from the tenements. At
the beginning the acting major general in command had been fond of
boasting that he had representatives of thirty-two nations and
practitio