ing pigeon story. Though I send it ever so far--though
its destination be the office of a home-and-fireside magazine or one of
the kind with a French story in the back, it will return to me. After
each flight its feathers will be a little more rumpled, its wings more
weary, its course more wavering, until, battered, spent, broken, it will
flutter to rest in the waste basket.

And yet, though its message may never be delivered, it must be sent,
because--well, because----

You know where the car turns at Eighteenth? There you see a glaringly
attractive billboard poster. It depicts groups of smiling, white-clad
men standing on tropical shores, with waving palms overhead, and a
glimpse of blue sea in the distance. The wording beneath the picture
runs something like this:

"Young men wanted. An unusual opportunity for travel, education, and
advancement. Good pay. No expenses."

When the car turns at Eighteenth, and I see that, I remember Eddie
Houghton back home. And when I remember Eddie Houghton I see red.

The day after Eddie Houghton finished high school he went to work. In
our town we don't take a job. We accept a position. Our paper had it
that "Edwin Houghton had accepted a position as clerk and assistant
chemist at the Kunz drugstore, where he would take up his new duties
Monday."

His new duties seemed, at first, to consist of opening the store in the
morning, sweeping out, and whizzing about town on a bicycle with an
unnecessarily insistent bell, delivering prescriptions which had been
telephoned for. But by the time the summer had really set in Eddie was
installed back of the soda fountain.

There never was anything better looking than Eddie Houghton in his white
duck coat. He was one of those misleadingly gold and pink and white men.
I say misleadingly because you usually associate pink-and-whiteness with
such words as sissy and mollycoddle. Eddie was neither. He had played
quarter-back every year from his freshman year, and he could putt the
shot and cut classes with the best of 'em. But in that white duck coat
with the braiding and frogs he had any musical-comedy, white-flannel
tenor lieutenant whose duty it is to march down to the edge of the
footlights, snatch out his sword, and warble about his country's flag,
looking like a flat-nosed, blue-gummed Igorrote. Kunz's soda water
receipts swelled to double their usual size, and the girls' complexions
were something awful that summer. I