"Poor lad," I heard one girl say to another, standing close by, "he looks so sick and thin, I'm sorry for him."
They did not notice that my soldier's uniform had cloth buttons. Simmons had made me put cloth buttons on, at the hotel,—had furnished them to me—
"I don't want you going about the other way ... you're such a nut, you might get into trouble."
Mule-drivers and others in subsidiary service were allowed khaki with cloth buttons only ... at that time ... I don't know how it goes now.
The girls' taking me for a sick, discharged soldier made me think. I would travel in that guise.
With a second-hand Shakespeare, in one volume, of wretched print, with a much-abused school-copy of Cæsar, in the Latin (of whose idiomatic Latin I have never tired), an extra suit of khaki, a razor, tooth-brush, and tooth-powder—and a cake of soap—all wrapped up in my army blankets, I set forth on my peregrinations as blanket-stiff or "bindle-bum."
Where I saw I could escape without awkward questioning, I played the convalescent ex-soldier ... I thrived. My shadow-thinness almost turned to fatness. It would have, had there been any disposition toward obesity in me....
At times I was ashamed of doing nothing ... queer spurts of American economic conscience....