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. It reached out across
the Atlantic Ocean from the Chester Ball of his Chicago days, before he
had even heard of English gardens.

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 daredeviltry went hand in
hand with his work--a calling in which a careless load dispatcher, a
cut wire, or a faulty strap may mean instant death. Usually the girls
laughed and called back to them or went on more quickly, the color in
their cheeks a little higher.

But not Anastasia Rourke. Early the first morning of a two-week job on
the new