s who had
come during the year that had passed. Buzz knew them all.

They greeted him at first with a mixture of shyness and resentment. They
eyed his leg, and his uniform, and the metal and ribbon thing that hung
at his breast. Bing and Red and Spider were there. Casey was gone.

Finally Spider spat and said, "G'wan, Buzz, give us your spiel about how
you saved young Hatton--the simp!"

"Who says he's a simp?" inquired Buzz, very quietly. But there was a
look about his jaw.

"Well--anyway--the papers was full of how you was a hero. Say, is that
right that old Hatton's goin' to send you to college? Huh? Je's!"

"Yeh," chorused the others, "go on, Buzz. Tell us."

Red put his question. "Tell us about the fightin', Buzz. Is it like they
say?"

It was Buzz Werner's great moment. He had pictured it a thousand times
in his mind as he lay in the wet trenches, as he plodded the muddy
French roads, as he reclined in his wheel chair in the hospital garden.
He had them in the hollow of his hand. His eyes brightened. He looked at
the faces so eagerly fixed on his utterance.

"G'wan, Buzz," they urged.

Buzz opened his lips and the words he used were the words he might have
used a year before, as to choice. "There's nothin' to tell. A guy didn't
have no time to be scairt. Everything kind of come at once, and you got
yours, or either you didn't. That's all there was to it. Je's, it was
fierce!"

They waited. Nothing more. "Yeh, but tell us--"

And suddenly Buzz turned away. The little group about him fell back,
respectfully. Something in his face, perhaps. A quietness, a new
dignity.

"S'long, boys," he said. And limped off, toward home.

And in that moment Buzz, the bully and braggart, vanished forever. And
in his place--head high, chest up, eyes clear--limped Ernest Werner, the
man.

IV

THE ELDEST

The Self-Complacent Young Cub leaned an elbow against the mantel as
you've seen it done in English plays, and blew a practically perfect
smoke-ring. It hurtled toward me like a discus.

"Trouble with your stuff," he began at once (we had just been
introduced), "is that it lacks plot. Been meaning to meet and tell you
that for a long time. Your characterization's all right, and your
dialogue. In fact, I think they're good. But your stuff lacks _raison
d'etre_--if you know what I mean.

"But"--in feeble self-defence--"people's insides are often so much more
interesting than their outsides; that which they