Farrel returned to the battery, brought them to attention, and said: 

“The skipper wants to say good-by, men, but he isn’t up to the job.  He’s afraid to tackle it; so he has asked me to wish you light duty, heavy pay, and double rations in civil life.  He has asked me to say to you that he loves you all and will not soon forget such soldiers as you have proved yourselves to be.”

“Three for the Skipper!  Give him three and a tiger!” somebody pleaded, and the cheers were given with a hearty generosity which even the most disgruntled organization can develop on the day of demobilization.

The skipper came to the door of the orderly-room.

“Good-by, good luck, and God bless you, lads!” he shouted, and nod with the discharges under his arm, while the battery “counted off,” and, in command of Farrel (the lieutenants had already been demobilized), marched to the pay-tables.  As they emerged from the paymaster’s shack, they scattered singly, in little groups, back to the demobilization-shacks.  Presently, bearing straw suitcases, “tin” helmets, and gas-masks (these latter articles presented to them by a paternal government as souvenirs of their service), they drifted out through the Presidio gate, where the world swallowed them.

Although he had been the first man in the battery to receive his discharge, Farrel was the last man to leave the Presidio.  He waited until the captain, having distributed the discharges, came out of the pay-office and repaired again to his deserted orderly-room; whereupon the former first sergeant followed him.

“I hesitate to obtrude, sir,” he announced, as he entered the room, “but whether the captain likes it or not, he’ll have to say good-by to me.  I have attended to everything I can think of, sir; so, unless the captain has some further use for me, I shall be jogging along.”

“Farrel,” the captain declared, “if I had ever had a doubt as to why I made you top cutter of B battery, that last remark of yours would have dissipated it.  Please do not be in a hurry.  Sit down and mourn with me for a little while.”

“Well, I’ll sit down with you, sir, but I’ll be hanged if I’ll be mournful.  I’m too happy in the knowledge that I’m going home.”

“Where is your home, sergeant?”

“In San Marcos County, in the southern part of the state.  After two years of Siberia and four days of this San Francisco fog, I’m fed up on low temperatures, and, by the holy poker, I want to go home.  It isn’t much of a home—­just a quaint, old, crumbling adobe ruin, but it’s home, and it’s mine.  Yes, sir; I’m going home and sleep in the bed my great-greatgrandfather was born in.”

“If I had a bed that old, I’d fumigate it,” the captain declared.  Like all regular army officers, he was a very devil of a fellow for sanitation.  “Do you worship your ancestors, Farrel?”

“Well, come to think of it, I have rather a reverence for ’the ashes of my fathers and the temples of my gods.’”