't go an' do anything foolish, did you,
Carrie?"

"Not unless you'd call throwing a pail of cold water on him foolish,"
said Carrie, wiping her eyes.

"Somethin's got to be done, Anderson," said his wife, compressing her
lips.

Susie came in at that juncture. She was the apple of Anderson's eye--the
prettiest girl in town. Mr. Crow hurried to the kitchen door.

"Go back upstairs," he ordered, casting a swift, uneasy glance around
the back yard.

"What's the matter, Pop?"

Mr. Crow did not respond. His keen, roving eye had descried a motionless
figure at the mouth of the alley.

Caroline explained.

"Can you beat it?" cried Susie, inelegantly, but with a very proper
scorn. "I told him yesterday he ought to be ashamed of himself, trying
to coax Fanny Burns away from Ed Foster."

"Ed Foster?" exclaimed Mr. Crow sharply, turning from the doorway. "Why,
he's not goin' to be married till after the war, an' that's a long ways
off. Ed's around in his uniform an' says the National Guard's likely to
be called 'most any day now. He--"

"That's one of the arguments Joe Smathers put up to Fanny," said his
youngest daughter. "He said maybe the war would last five years, and he
thought she was a fool to wait that long. What's more, he said, if Ed
ever does get to France he's likely to be killed--or fatally
wounded--and then where would she be?"

Anderson suddenly lifted his right leg and slapped it with great force.

"By the great Jehoshaphat!" he shouted. "I've got it! I've solved the
whole derned mystery. Come to me like a flash. Of all the low-down,
cowardly--"

Mrs. Crow interrupted him. "Do you mean to say, Anderson Crow, that you
never suspected what's got into all these gay Lotharios?"

He was instantly on his guard. "What are you talkin' about, Ma?" he
demanded querulously. "You surely can't mean to insinuate that I--"

"What is this mystery you've just been solvin'?" she asked relentlessly.

He met this with a calm intolerance.

"Nothin' much. Just simply got to the bottom of a German plot to stuff
the young men of America so full of weddin' cake they won't be able to
git into the trenches, that's all."

"My goodness!" exclaimed Mrs. Crow, who, as a dutiful wife, never failed
to be impressed by her husband's belated discoveries.

"Eggin' our boys into gittin' married, so's they can't be drafted," went
on Anderson, expanding with his new-found idea. "It's a general
pro-German plot--world-wide, as the s