I don’t know.  I ain’t made up my mind about Herman, even yet.  If it wasn’t for why he had to leave Nevada and if I knew there could be more than one kind of German, then I’d almost say Herman was the other kind.  But, of course, there can’t be but one kind, and he showed the Prussian strain fast enough in why he come up from Reno.  Still and all, he’s got his engaging points as a pure imbecile or something.

He don’t tell me why he left Reno for a long time after he gets here; not till I’d won his confidence by showing I was a German sympathizer.  It was when Sandy Sawtelle had a plan for a kind of grand war measure.  His grand war measure was to get some secret agents into Germany and kill off all the women under fifty.  He said if you done this the stock would die out, because look at the game laws against killing does!  He told this to everybody.  He told it to Herman; but Herman knew enough to remain noncommittal ’bout it.  He told it to me, and I saw right off it probably couldn’t be managed right; and, even if it could be, I said to Sandy, it seemed to me somehow like it would be sort of inhuman.

Herman heard me say this and got the idea I was a pacifist and a secret friend of his country; so he confided to me the secret of why he left Reno to keep from having his heart cut out by Manuel Romares.  But no matter!

Anyway, last year in the spring this Herman dropped by, looking for work.  He hadn’t been in America long, having stopped with his uncle in Cincinnati a while, and then coming West on a life of adventure and to take up a career.  He said now he’d come up from Nevada, where he’d been working on a sheep ranch, and he acted like he wanted to get into something respectable and lead a decent life again.

Well, it had got so I hired everything that come along; so why not Herman?  I grabbed at him.  The boys heard he was a German alien and acted, at first, like a bunch of hogs with a bear about; but I’d of hired old Hinderburg himself if he’d offered and put him to doing something worth while.

This Herman was the first man ever worked here in side whiskers.  He told me, after I showed myself a German sympathizer, that in the beginning of the war he’d wore one of them moustaches like the Kaiser puts up in tin fasteners every night after he’s said his prayers; but this had made him an object of unpleasant remark, including missiles.  So he had growed this flowering border round it to take off the curse.

They was beautiful shiny side whiskers and entirely innocent-looking.  In the right clothes Herman could of gone into any Sabbath school in the land and said he was glad to see so many bright little faces there this morning, and now what was to-day’s golden text, and so on.  That’s what he looked like.  These things fell like portieres each side of his face, leaving his chin as naked as the day he was born.  He didn’t have any too much under his mouth either; so I guess the whiskers was really a mercy to his face.