older, and they have such
queer-looking eyes, and jaws, and foreheads. But then," she finished,
with mock cheerfulness, "you can never tell in those silly kodak
pictures."

Eddie's mother studied the card again, and sighed gently. "I hope," she
said, "that Eddie won't get into bad company."

After that our postal cards ceased. I wish that there was some way of
telling this story so that the end wouldn't come in the middle. But
there is none. In our town we know the news before the paper comes out,
and we only read it to verify what we have heard. So that long before
the paper came out in the middle of the afternoon we had been horrified
by the news of Eddie Houghton's desertion and suicide. We stopped one
another on Main Street to talk about it, and recall how boyish and
handsome he had looked in his white duck coat, and on that last day just
as the 10:15 pulled out. "It don't seem hardly possible, does it?" we
demanded of each other.

But when Eddie's mother brought out the letters that had come after our
postal cards had ceased, we understood. And when they brought him home,
and we saw him for the last time, all those of us who had gone to school
with him, and to dances, and sleigh rides, and hayrack parties, and
picnics, and when we saw the look on his face--the look of one who,
walking in a sunny path has stumbled upon something horrible and
unclean--we forgave him his neglect of us, we forgave him desertion,
forgave him the taking of his own life, forgave him the look that he had
brought into his mother's eyes.

There had never been anything extraordinary about Eddie Houghton. He had
had his faults and virtues, and good and bad sides just like other boys
of his age. He--oh, I am using too many words, when one slang phrase
will express it. Eddie had been just a nice young kid. I think the
worst thing he had ever said was "Damn!" perhaps. If he had sworn, it
was with clean oaths, calculated to relieve the mind and feelings.

But the men that he shipped with during that year or more--I am sure that
he had never dreamed that such men were. He had never stood on the
curbing outside a recruiting office on South State Street, in the old
levee district, and watched that tragic panorama move by--those nightmare
faces, drink-marred, vice-scarred, ruined.

I know that he had never seen such faces in all his clean, hard-working
young boy's life, spent in our prosperous little country town. I am
certain