Erskine nodded. "Yes," he said. "We'll be lucky if we avoid international complications."
"An apache murderer," Steve groaned—"and me thinkin' it was a frawg hero. Will I get a court martial for it, sir?"
"I doubt it," said Erskine, "but I don't think you'll get the Congressional Medal or the Legion of Honour, either. Maybe, though, the President, in recognition of your services toward cementing the entente, will appoint you the next ambassador to France."
"Well, anyway," said Steve, still violently red about the face and ears—"well, anyway, I don't care. Even if it weren't a first-class corpse, it was a first-class funeral."
FOOTFALLS
BY WILBUR DANIEL STEELE
From The Pictorial Review
This is not an easy story; not a road for tender or for casual feet. Better the meadows. Let me warn you, it is as hard as that old man's soul and as sunless as his eyes. It has its inception in catastrophe, and its end in an act of almost incredible violence; between them it tells barely how one long blind can become also deaf and dumb.
He lived in one of those old Puritan sea towns where the strain has come down austere and moribund, so that his act would not be quite unbelievable. Except that the town is no longer Puritan and Yankee. It has been betrayed; it has become an outpost of the Portuguese islands.
This man, this blind cobbler himself, was a Portuguese from St.
Michael, in the Western Islands, and his name was Boaz Negro.