r and had won favor with his fellows
and the ranch boss; of a one-time gourmet's healthy appetite for the
fare of the chuck wagon. Lanstron, reading more between the lines than
in them, understood that as muscles hardened with the new life the old
passion was dying and in its place was coming something equally
dangerous as a possible force in driving his ardent nature to some
excess for the sake of oblivion. Finally, Feller broke out with the
truth.

"My hair is white now, Lanny," he wrote. "I have aged ten years in these
two. With every month of this new life the horror of my career has
become clear to me. I lie awake thinking of it. I feel unworthy to
associate with my simple, outspoken, free-riding companions. Remorse is
literally burning up my brain. It is better to have my mind diseased, my
moral faculties blurred, my body unsound; for to be normal, healthy,
industrious is to remember the whole ghastly business of my dishonor.

"'Pay back! Pay back in some way!' a voice keeps saying. 'Pay back! Have
an object in mind. Get to work on something that will help you to pay
back or you will soon take a plunge to lower depths than you have yet
sounded.'

"It is not the gambling, not the drinking--no! The thing that I cannot
forget, that grows more horrible the more keenly awake clean living
makes me to the past, is that I am inwardly foul--as foul as a priest
who has broken his vows. I have disgraced the uniform--my country's
uniform. I may never wear that uniform again; never look the meanest
private in a battery in the face without feeling my cheeks hot with
shame. While I cannot right myself before the service, I should like to
do something to right myself with my conscience. I should like to see a
battery march past and look at the flag and into the faces of the
soldiers of my country feeling that I had atoned--feeling so for my own
peace of mind--atoned by some real deed of service.

"I have been reading how Japanese volunteers made a bridge of their
bodies for their comrades into a Russian trench, and when everybody else
felt a horrible, uncanny admiration for such madness I have envied them
the glorious exhilaration of the moment before the charge. That was a
sufficient reward in life for death. So I come again to you for help.
Now that you are chief of intelligence you must have many secret agents
within the inner circle of the army's activities. In the midst of peace
and the commonplaces of drill and manoeuvr