as a good prospect. He turned over in his mind the best method of
approach. It was a queer thing, he pondered, to visualize himself as a
salesman. He wondered how many of the other fellows who had come back
looked at it as he did. They had dreamed such dreams of valor, their
eyes had seen visions. To Randy when he had enlisted had come a
singing sense that the days of chivalry were not dead. He had gone
through the war with a laugh on his lips, but with a sense of the
sacredness of the crusade in his heart. He had returned--still
dreaming--to sell snub-nosed cars to the countryside!

Why, just a year ago----! He remembered a black night of storm, when,
hooded like a falcon--he had ridden without a light on his motorcycle,
carrying dispatches from the Argonne, and even as he had ridden, he had
felt that high sense of heroic endeavor. On the success of his mission
depended other lives, the saving of nations--victory----!

And now he, with a million others, was faced by the problem of the
day's work. He wondered how the others looked at it--those gallant
young knights in khaki who had followed the gleam. Were they, too,
grasping at any job that would buy them bread and butter, pay their
bills, keep them from living on the bounty of others?

He felt that in some way the thing was all wrong. There should, have
been big things for these boys to do. There seemed something insensate
in a civilization which would permit a man who wore medals of honor to
sell ribbon over a counter, or weigh out beef at a butcher's. Yet he
supposed that many of them were doing it. Indeed he knew that some of
them were. The butcher's boy, who brought the meat over every morning
to King's Crest, wore two decorations, and when Randy had stopped for
breakfast supplies, the hero of Belleau Woods had cut off sausages as
calmly as he had once bayonetted Huns.

Randy wondered what the butcher's boy was feeling under that apparently
stolid surface. Was his horizon bounded by beef and sausages, or did
his soul expand with memories of the shoulder-to-shoulder march, the
comradeship of the trenches, the laughter and songs? Did his pulses
thrill with the thought of the big things he might yet do in these days
of peace, or was he content to play safe and snip sausages?

Randy felt that he was not content. It was not that he loved war. But
he loved the visions that the war had brought him. There had seemed no
limit then to America's ac