The colonel turned as if to move toward the information desk at the office, and then turned back.
"Pardon me!" he said, "but I forgot to inquire concerning your own errand in the city."
"I am on my way to Canada, grandfather."
A look of surprise came into the old man's eyes, followed at once by an expression of infinite scorn. He remembered that, in the days of the civil war, slackers and rebel sympathizers who wished to evade the draft made their way across the national border into Canada. They had received the contempt of their own generation and had drawn a figurative bar-sinister across the shield of their descendants. Could it be possible that this grandchild of his was about to add disgrace to disloyalty? That, in addition to heaping insults on the flag of his country as a boy, he was now, as a man, taking time by the forelock and escaping to the old harbor of safety to avoid some possible future conscription? The absurdity and impracticability of such a proposition did not occur to him at the moment, only the humiliation and the horror of it.
"To Canada, sir?" he demanded; "the refuge of cowards and copperheads! Why to Canada, sir, in the face of this impending crisis in your country's affairs?"
His voice rose at the end in angry protest. The look of scorn that blazed from under his gray eye-brows was withering in its intensity. Pen, who was sufficiently familiar with the history of the civil war to know what lay in his grandfather's mind, answered quickly but quietly:
"I am going to Canada to enlist."
"To—to what? Enlist?"
"Yes; in the American Legion; to fight under the Union Jack in France."
A pillar stood near by, and the colonel backed up against it for support. The shock of the surprise, the sudden revulsion of feeling, left him nerveless.