“’Last night I captured a big fat enemy; you know—­a Heinie.  It was as dark as a cave, but I heard one snooping close.  I says to my pardner I keep hearing one snoop close; and he says forget it, because my hive is swarming or something; and I says no; I will go out there and molest that German.  So I sneaked over the bank and through our barbed-wire fence that everyone puts up here, and out a little ways to where I had heard one snoop; and, sure enough—­what do you think?  He seen me first and knocked my gun out of my hands with the butt of his.  It got me mad, because it is a new gun and I am taking fine care of it; so I clanched him’—­that’s what Squat says, clanched.  ’And, first, he run his finger into my right eye, clear up to the knuckle it felt like; so I didn’t say a word, but hauled off quick and landed a hard right on the side of his jaw and dropped him just like that.  It was one peach I handed him and he slumped down like a sack of mush.  I am here to tell you it was just one punch, though a dandy; but he had tried to start a fight, so it was his own fault.  So I took all his weapons away and when he come alive I kicked him a few times and made him go into the U.S. trenches.  He didn’t turn out to be much—­only a piano tuner from Milwaukee; and I wish it had of been a general I caught snooping.  I certainly did molest him a-plenty, all right.  Just one punch and I brought him down out of control.  Ha!  Ha!  The life here is very different.’

“There; that must of been what he tried to say at the beginning—­’The life here is very different.’  I should think he’d find it so, seeing the only danger that boy was ever in here was the sleeping sickness.”

Hereupon the lady removed the wrapper from a trade journal and scanned certain market quotations.  They pleased her little.  She said it was darned queer that the war should send every price in the world up but the price of beef, beef quotations being just where the war had found them.  Not that she wanted to rob any one!  Still and all, why give everyone a chance but cattle raisers?  She muttered hugely of this discrimination and a moment later seemed to be knitting her remarks into a gray sock.  The mutterings had gradually achieved the coherence of remarks.  And I presently became aware that the uninflated price of beef was no longer their burden.

They now concerned the singular reticence of all losers of fist fights.  Take Squat’s German.  Squat would be telling for the rest of his life how he put that Wisconsin alien out with one punch.  But if I guessed the German would be telling it as often as Squat told it I was plumb foolish.  He wouldn’t tell it at all.  Losers never do.  Any one might think that parties getting licked lost their powers of speech.  Not so with the winners of fights; not so at all!