The wide publicity given to the Legion and its aims brought into the Temporary Committee many amusing letters.  Scores of them complained of the published statement that it was non-partisan and non-political.  “Damn it all, we want it to be political and partisan,” one angry Westerner wrote.  Another correspondent insisted that in view of the fact that sons of Theodore Roosevelt, and Speaker Champ Clark were interested, the Legion must be bi-partisan and bi-political.  But most of the letters were of a highly commendatory character, expressing the deepest and widest possible interest.  I recall that one of them came from Junction City, Kansas, another from Old Town, Maine; one from Delray, Texas, and others from Wolf Creek, Montana, Orlando, Florida, and Ray’s Crossing, Indiana, while a postal card making frantic inquiries was dated Nome, Alaska, and arrived a week after the caucus at St. Louis.  I have mentioned these towns and localities because they indicate how widespread and deep is the interest in the Legion.  No matter where a man came from to go into the army, the Legion will go to him in his home now.  Its members will range from fishermen on the Florida Keys to the mail carriers on the Tanana in Alaska, from the mill hands of New England to the cotton planters of the Mississippi delta.  All who wore the uniform may enroll just so long as the word Americanism was inscribed in their hearts between April 6, 1917, and November 11, 1918.

CHAPTER IV

THE ADVANCE COMMITTEE

When the St. Louisian puffed its way into the big smoke-begrimed station in Missouri’s largest city I looked about me for Bill, who was going to meet me at the station.  We had not met since our prep. school and college days when Bill had been a thin, wizened little fellow, so hollow-chested that he had to be sent to Colorado for almost two years for his health.  He came back to school looking better but before his diploma was handed to him announcing to the world that he was a full-fledged Bachelor of Arts, he had fallen apparently permanently into the rut of ill-health.  In fact I wondered, when we all sang Auld Lang Syne in the fraternity house at the close of college, if I’d ever see Bill again.

From time to time I had heard from him in the years that followed, and one day in the summer of 1917 he wrote me that he was on the way to France.

While I gazed up and down the smoke-laden platform, I got a slap on the shoulder that sent me spinning, and there was the once emaciated Bill, who seemed to have grown three inches and to have put on seventy-five pounds.

As we walked toward the taxicab stand I began to realize that instead of an old friend, a stranger was beside me.  True enough, he had the same name and the same colored eyes, and his hair hadn’t changed.  But the rather dreamy eye had cleared, the pale face of old was tanned, and Bill’s chest—­the one he had gone to Colorado for—­was bulging out as he carried my two heavy suit cases like a pouter pigeon’s at a poultry show.