m a farewell
dinner, at which the American consul and his family, with all the other
Americans then in Salonika, were present, and after the dinner we rowed
out to his ship and saw him very uncomfortably installed for his voyage.
He came down the sea ladder and waved his hand as we rowed away. That
was the last I saw of Richard Harding Davis.
JOHN T. MCCUTCHEON.
THE LOST ROAD
During the war with Spain, Colton Lee came into the service as a
volunteer. For a young man, he always had taken life almost too
seriously, and when, after the campaign in Cuba, he elected to make
soldiering his profession, the seriousness with which he attacked his
new work surprised no one. Finding they had lost him forever, his
former intimates were bored, but his colonel was enthusiastic, and the
men of his troop not only loved, but respected him.
From the start he determined in his new life women should have no
part--a determination that puzzled no one so much as the women, for to
Lee no woman, old or young, had found cause to be unfriendly. But he
had read that the army is a jealous mistress who brooks no rival, that
"red lips tarnish the scabbard steel," that "he travels the fastest who
travels alone."
So, when white hands beckoned and pretty eyes signalled, he did not
look. For five years, until just before he sailed for his three years
of duty in the Philippines, he succeeded not only in not looking, but
in building up for himself such a fine reputation as a woman-hater that
all women were crazy about him. Had he not been ordered to Agawamsett
that fact would not have affected him. But at the Officers' School he
had indulged in hard study rather than in hard riding, had overworked,
had brought back his Cuban fever, and was in poor shape to face the
tropics. So, for two months before the transport was to sail, they
ordered him to Cape Cod to fill his lungs with the bracing air of a New
England autumn.
He selected Agawamsett, because, when at Harvard, it was there he had
spent his summer vacations, and he knew he would find sailboats and
tennis and, through the pine woods back of the little whaling village,
many miles of untravelled roads. He promised himself that over these
he would gallop an imaginary troop in route marches, would manoeuvre it
against possible ambush, and, in combat patrols, ground scouts, and
cossack outposts, charge with it "as foragers." But he did none of
these things. For at Agawamset
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