“After we had disbanded in the armory, Willie says to me: 

“‘Want to walk out a piece with me?’

“‘Why, yes,’ says I, ’if it ain’t so far that we can’t hear the tumult and the shouting die away.  I’m hungry myself,’ says I, ’and I’m pining for some home grub, but I’ll go with you.’

“Willie steered me down some side streets till we came to a little white cottage in a new lot with a twenty-by-thirty-foot lawn decorated with brickbats and old barrel-staves.

“‘Halt and give the countersign,’ says I to Willie.  ’Don’t you know this dugout?  It’s the bird’s-nest that Joe Granberry built before he married Myra Allison.  What you going there for?’

“But Willie already had the gate open.  He walked up the brick walk to the steps, and I went with him.  Myra was sitting in a rocking-chair on the porch, sewing.  Her hair was smoothed back kind of hasty and tied in a knot.  I never noticed till then that she had freckles.  Joe was at one side of the porch, in his shirt-sleeves, with no collar on, and no signs of a shave, trying to scrape out a hole among the brickbats and tin cans to plant a little fruit-tree in.  He looked up but never said a word, and neither did Myra.

“Willie was sure dandy-looking in his uniform, with medals strung on his breast and his new gold-handled sword.  You’d never have taken him for the little white-headed snipe that the girls used to order about and make fun of.  He just stood there for a minute, looking at Myra with a peculiar little smile on his face; and then he says to her, slow, and kind of holding on to his words with his teeth: 

“‘Oh, I don’t know!  Maybe I could if I tried!’

“That was all that was said.  Willie raised his hat, and we walked away.

“And, somehow, when he said that, I remembered, all of a sudden, the night of that dance and Willie brushing his hair before the looking-glass, and Myra sticking her head in the door to guy him.

“When we got back to Sam Houston Avenue, Willie says: 

“’Well, so long, Ben.  I’m going down home and get off my shoes and take a rest.’

“‘You?’ says I.  ’What’s the matter with you?  Ain’t the court-house jammed with everybody in town waiting to honor the hero?  And two brass-bands, and recitations and flags and jags and grub to follow waiting for you?’

“Willie sighs.

“‘All right, Ben,’ says he.  ’Darned if I didn’t forget all about that.’

“And that’s why I say,” concluded Ben Granger, “that you can’t tell where ambition begins any more than you can where it is going to wind up.”

THE HEAD-HUNTER

When the war between Spain and George Dewey was over, I went to the Philippine Islands.  There I remained as bush-whacker correspondent for my paper until its managing editor notified me that an eight-hundred-word cablegram describing the grief of a pet carabao over the death of an infant Moro was not considered by the office to be war news.  So I resigned, and came home.