“Going back?” I repeated, bewildered. “Where?”
“Back to camp,” he replied. Then he began to speak in a low, husky voice. “I want to tell you something,” he said. “I’m not what you think I am. I’m a deserter. That is, I would have been by tomorrow. My leave expires to-night. I wasn’t going back. I didn’t want to go into the army. I didn’t want to fight for the country. I hated the United States. It had never given me a square deal. My father was killed in a factory when I was a baby and my mother never got a cent out of it. She wasn’t strong and she worked herself to death trying to support herself and me. I grew up in an orphan asylum where everybody was down on me and made me do all the unpleasant jobs, and at twelve I was adrift in the world. I sold papers in the streets and managed to make a living, but one night I went out with a crowd of boys and some of the older ones knocked a man down and stole his money and the police caught the whole bunch and we were sent to the Reformatory. After that I had a hard time trying to make an honest living because people don’t like to hire anyone that’s been in the Reformatory. I never had any fun the way other boys did. I had to live in cheap boarding places because I didn’t earn much and nobody that was decent seemed to care to associate with me. I was sick of living that way and wanted to go away to South America where no one would know about the Reformatory, and make a clean start. Then I was drafted. I hated army life, too. All the other fellows got mail and boxes from home and had a big fuss made over them and I didn’t have a soul to write to me or send me things. I was given a good deal of kitchen duty to do and everybody looks down on that. I kept getting sorer and sorer all the time and at last I decided to desert. I got a three-days’ leave and made up my mind that I wouldn’t go back. I was just hanging around the street killing time this afternoon when I saw a crowd and stopped to see what the excitement was about. Then all of a sudden you looked at me and motioned me to come over and help you raise the flag. It was the first time I had ever touched the Stars and Stripes. When the folds fell around my shoulders before she went sailing up, something wakened in me that I had never felt before. I couldn’t believe it was I, standing there raising the flag with all those people cheering. It intoxicated me and carried me along with the parade when it went to the armory. Then again, like the hand of fate, you came out and pulled me in and made me speak to the girls. I had never spoken before anyone in my life. I had never ‘been in’ anything. It made another man of me. All of a sudden I found I did love my country after all. I did have something to fight for. I did belong somewhere. It did thrill me to see Old Glory fluttering out in the wind. That was my country’s flag, my flag. I was willing to die for it. I’m going back to camp to-night,” he finished simply.
I gripped his hands silently, too moved to speak.
All the while we were talking there the crowd had been busy getting their things together and going out and nobody paid any attention to us sitting there in the shadow under the gallery. Now, however, I was aware of somebody approaching directly, and along came the Mayor, gracious and smiling, to shake hands with the speaker of the afternoon.
“Those were rattling good stories you told,” he said in his hearty way. “I say, won’t you be a guest at a little dinner the frat brothers are giving this evening, and tell them to the boys? That’s the kind of stuff everybody’s interested in.”
And off went the man who had never had a chance, arm in arm with the Mayor, to be guest of honor at a dinner in the finest hotel in the city!
Jiminy! Do you see what the Winnebagos have gone and done? They’ve saved a man from being a deserter! I’ve promised to write to him and get the rest of the girls to write and send him things, and I’ll bet that he’ll be loyal to the flag to the last gasp.
Now aren’t you glad you’re a Winnebago?
Your loving old pal,
Sahwah.