"Peter? Peter who?"
"Peter Bell--in Gay Street."
"Oh, yes. You see a good deal of the Bells, Murray?"
"Yes, sir."
"I don't think I should apply to have him released from service," said Mr. Townsend, slowly, grim lines settling about his mouth.
A week went by. At its close a second briefly letter arrived from Forrest, addressed to his mother. It stated that Forrest had enlisted in the army, and had, at his own application, been allowed to join a regiment just leaving for San Francisco, to be sent for a term of three years' service in the Philippines. By the time the letter reached home, Forrest would have sailed.
The letter was written in a spirit of boyish bravado, like the first, but although it upset Mrs. Townsend again and sent her back to her bed, it relieved the tension of the family. It furnished definite news of the young fellow's whereabouts, and made it possible to communicate with him when he should have reached his destination.
Mrs. Townsend spent many days thereafter in urging her husband to apply at headquarters to have her son returned. It could be done, she was sure, because the boy was but nineteen, and having enlisted without his father's permission, must have misrepresented his age at the recruiting-station. But Mr. Townsend remained firm. He said that Forrest, having chosen this course, must abide by it, at least for the term of service for which he had enlisted. He would not have a turncoat for a son, he said sternly, although with a suspicious lowering of the voice; and he was more and more impressed with the conviction that the hard realities of life would make a man out of Forrest if the stuff of which men are made was in him.
"Meanwhile," he said to Murray, with a sadness which the other detected, "it is the father, rather than the son, after all, who has the bitterest dose of medicine to take."
"I 'm sorry, sir," was all Murray could say, wondering if his father meant the fact that his plan for taking Forrest into the business would have to be given up.