Horsesense Hank does his bit

By NELSON S. BOND
Pearl Harbor got Horsesense Hank mad. Something ought to be done about it—and he was the man who was going to do it!
Like the rain-drenched angler said as he reeled in a fish, Life is just one damp thing after another! I thought I'd fixed everything all hunky-dory around the campus of dear old Midland U. when I finally got my friend Horsesense Hank Cleaver engaged to Helen MacDowell. Which just goes to prove that you shouldn't count your chickens until they're hitched. Because That Man stepped in and messed up everything.
You know the guy I mean. The chief germ in Germany. The little ex-housepainter with a scrap of old paintbrush on his upper lip. First he protected himself against the poor Austrians. Then the Czechs and the Poles. Then came Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg—it sounds like a geography lesson, doesn't it?—then France, the Balkans, Greece and Crete. And finally, as his armies, having come a cropper against the outraged Russian bear, stalled on the icy steppes of Moscow's doorway, he invoked the aid of his yellow-skinned and -spined allies, the Japs.
While their envoys calmed Washington with soft words of peace, their air-arm bombed Pearl Harbor with grim weapons of war. It was then that Horsesense Hank came to me and said soberly, Well, so long, Jim. I'll see you later.
I asked, Where are you going? Down to Mike's for a hamburger? Wait a minute; I'll go with.
I'm goin' further'n that, Jim, said Hank, an' the chances are I'll be gone a mite longer. I— He wriggled a bulldog-tipped shoe into the carpet embarrassedly— I reckon I'm agonna sign up for the duration.
I gasped. You mean the army?
Well, not eggsackly. I don't figger they'd want me in the fightin' forces, me bein' skinny like I am. But folks say I'm right quick with math'matics an' things like that, so if I c'n be of any help to my country—
Hank was not exaggerating a bit. Almost everyone on the Midland campus, including sweet little me, had known more formal education than H. Cleaver. Eighty-five per cent of the faculty members dangled alphabets after their names till they looked like government projects, but Hank could give them all a running start and beat them silly on any question requiring the use of good, old-fashioned common sense.