This boy had not come to his decision in a moment.  His untrained but thoroughly honest mind worked slowly.  He had been pondering the opportunities of army life for many weeks.  The idea had come to him by chance, he thought.

Over a month ago he had been plowing the lower forty of Old Man Huggins’s farm.  The road to the mountains lay along one side of the field, and as the boy turned and started to plow his furrow toward the road he noticed that a motor cycle had stopped just beyond the fence.  “Broke down,” the boy commented to himself, as he saw the tan-clad rider dismounting.  Over the mule’s huge back he watched as he drew nearer.  “Why, the rider was in uniform; he must be a soldier!”

Sure enough, when the fence was reached the boy saw that the stranger was dressed in the regulation khaki of Uncle Sam, with the U.S. in block letters at the vent of the collar and two stripes on the left sleeve.

    “Broke down?” the boy queried, dropping his plow-handles.

    The corporal grunted and continued to potter with the machine.

    “You in the army?” the boy continued, leaning on the fence.

    “You bet!” assented the soldier.  Then, looking up and taking in the
    big, raw-boned physique of the youngster, “Ever think of joinin’?”

    “Can’t say’s I did.”

    “Got any friends in the army?”

    “Nope.”

    “Fine life.”  The motor cycle was attracting little of the recruiting
    officer’s attention now, for he was a recruiting officer, and
    engaged in one of the most practical phases of his work.

    “Them soldiers have a pretty easy life, don’t they?” Evidently the
    boy was becoming interested.

    The recruiting officer laid down his tools, pulled out a pipe, and
    sat down comfortably under a small sycamore tree at the roadside.

“Not so very easy,” he replied, “but interesting and exciting.”  He paused for a minute to scrutinize the prospective recruit more closely.  To his experienced eye the boy appeared desirable.  Slouchy, dirty, and lazy-looking, perhaps; but there were nevertheless good muscles and a strong body under those ragged overalls.  The corporal launched into his story.

For twenty minutes the boy listened open-mouthed to the stories of post life, where baseball, football, and boxing divided the time with drilling; of mess-halls where a fellow could eat all he wanted to, free; of good-fellowship and fraternal pride in the organization; of the pleasant evenings in the amusement rooms in quarters.  And then of the life of the big world, of which the boy had only dreamed; of the Western plains, of Texas, the snowy ridges of the great Rockies, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, the Philippines, Hawaii, the strange glamour of the tropics, the great wildernesses of the frozen North.

    “It seems ’most like as I’d like to join,” was the timid venture.