“One—­two!—­three!  One—­two—­three!  One—­two—­three!” yelled this person.  And, “Inhale! Exhale! Inhale! Exhale!” till Buzz’s lungs were bursting, his eyes were starting from his head, his chest carried a sledge hammer inside it, his thigh-muscles screamed, and his legs, arms, neck, were no longer parts of him, but horrid useless burdens, detached, yet clinging.  He learned what this person meant when he shouted (always with the rising inflection), “Comp’ny!  Right! Whup!” Buzz whupped with the best of ’em.  The whipper-snapper seemed tireless.  Long after Buzz felt that another moment of it would kill him the lithe young lieutenant would be leaping about like a faun, and pride kept Buzz going though he wanted to drop with fatigue, and his shirt and hair and face were wet with sweat.

So much for his body.  It soon became accustomed to the routine, then hardened.  His mind was less pliable.  But that, too, was undergoing a change.  He found that the topics of conversation that used to interest his little crowd on the street corner in Chippewa were not of much interest, here.  There were boys from every part of the great country.  And they talked of the places whence they had come and speculated about the places to which they were going.  And Buzz listened and learned.  There was strangely little talk about girls.  There usually is when muscles and mind are being driven to the utmost.  But he heard men—­men as big as he—­speak openly of things that he had always sneered at as soft.  After one of these conversations he wrote an awkward, but significant scrawl home to his mother.

“Well Ma,” he wrote, “I guess maybe you would like to hear a few words from me.  Well I like it in the army it is the life for me you bet.  I am feeling great how are you all—­”

Ma Werner wasted an entire morning showing it around the neighbourhood, and she read and reread it until it was almost pulp.

Six months of this.  Buzz Werner was an intelligent machine composed of steel, cord, and iron.  I think he had forgotten that the Kearney girl had ever existed.  One day, after three months of camp life, the man in the next cot had thrown him a volume of Kipling.  Buzz fingered it, disinterestedly.  Until that moment Kipling had not existed for Buzz Werner.  After that moment he dominated his leisure hours.  The Y.M.C.A. hut had many battered volumes of this writer.  Buzz read them all.

The week before Thanksgiving Buzz found himself on his way to New York.  For some reason unexplained to him he was separated from his company in one of the great shake-ups performed for the good of the army.  He never saw them again.  He was sent straight to a New York camp.  When he beheld his new lieutenant his limbs became fluid, and his heart leaped into his throat, and his mouth stood open, and his eyes bulged.  It was young Hatton—­Harry Hatton—­whose aristocratic nose he had punched six months before, in the Hatton Pulp and Paper Mill.