Letters full of hope came from a Wyoming ranch; letters that told how Feller had learned to rope a steer and had won favor with his fellows and the ranch boss; of a one-time gourmet’s healthy appetite for the fare of the chuck wagon.  Lanstron, reading more between the lines than in them, understood that as muscles hardened with the new life the old passion was dying and in its place was coming something equally dangerous as a possible force in driving his ardent nature to some excess for the sake of oblivion.  Finally, Feller broke out with the truth.

“My hair is white now, Lanny,” he wrote.  “I have aged ten years in these two.  With every month of this new life the horror of my career has become clear to me.  I lie awake thinking of it.  I feel unworthy to associate with my simple, outspoken, free-riding companions.  Remorse is literally burning up my brain.  It is better to have my mind diseased, my moral faculties blurred, my body unsound; for to be normal, healthy, industrious is to remember the whole ghastly business of my dishonor.

“‘Pay back!  Pay back in some way!’ a voice keeps saying.  ’Pay back!  Have an object in mind.  Get to work on something that will help you to pay back or you will soon take a plunge to lower depths than you have yet sounded.’

“It is not the gambling, not the drinking—­no!  The thing that I cannot forget, that grows more horrible the more keenly awake clean living makes me to the past, is that I am inwardly foul—­as foul as a priest who has broken his vows.  I have disgraced the uniform—­my country’s uniform.  I may never wear that uniform again; never look the meanest private in a battery in the face without feeling my cheeks hot with shame.  While I cannot right myself before the service, I should like to do something to right myself with my conscience.  I should like to see a battery march past and look at the flag and into the faces of the soldiers of my country feeling that I had atoned—­feeling so for my own peace of mind—­atoned by some real deed of service.

“I have been reading how Japanese volunteers made a bridge of their bodies for their comrades into a Russian trench, and when everybody else felt a horrible, uncanny admiration for such madness I have envied them the glorious exhilaration of the moment before the charge.  That was a sufficient reward in life for death.  So I come again to you for help.  Now that you are chief of intelligence you must have many secret agents within the inner circle of the army’s activities.  In the midst of peace and the commonplaces of drill and manoeuvres there must be dangerous and trying work where the only distinction is service for the cause—­our cause of three million against five.  Find a task for me, no matter how mean, thankless, or dangerous, Lanny.  The more exacting it is the more welcome, for the better will be my chance to get right with myself.”

“Come!” was Lanstron’s cable in answer.