Burned Bridges

At a minute or two of ten the next morning Thompson stopped his car

before the Canadian Bank of Commerce. The bolt-studded doors were still

closed, and so he kept his seat behind the steering column, glancing

idly along Hastings at the traffic that flowed about the gray stone pile

of the post-office, while he waited the bank's opening for business.

A tall young man, a bit paler-faced perhaps than a normal young fellow

should be, but otherwise a fine-looking specimen of manhood, sauntered

slowly around the corner of the bank, and came to a stop on the curb

just abreast the fore end of Thompson's motor. He took out a cigarette

and lighted it with slow, deliberate motions. And as he stood there,

gazing with a detached impersonal air at the front of the Summit

roadster, there approached him a recruiting sergeant.

"How about joining up this morning?" he inquired briskly.

"Oh, I don't know," the young man responded casually. "I hadn't thought

about it."

"Every man should be thinking about it," the sergeant declared. "The

army needs men. Now a well-set-up young fellow like you would get on

capitally at soldiering. It's a great life. When we get the Germans

whipped every man will be proud to say he had a hand in it. If a man

struck you you wouldn't stand back and let some other fellow do your

fighting for you, now would you? More than that, between you and me, it

won't be long before an able-bodied man can't walk these streets in

civvies, without the girls hooting him. It's a man's duty to get into

this war. Better walk along with me to headquarters and sign on."

The young man gazed across the street with the same immobility of

expression.

"What's the inducement?" he asked presently.

The sergeant, taking his cue from this, launched forth upon a glowing

description of army life, the pay, the glory, the manifold advantages

that would certainly accrue. He painted a rosy picture, a gallant

picture. One gathered from his talk that a private in khaki was greater

than a captain of industry in civilian clothes. He dwelt upon the

brotherhood, the democracy of arms. He spilled forth a lot of the

buncombe that is swallowed by those who do not know from bitter

experience that war, at best, is a ghastly job in its modern phases, a

thing that the common man may be constrained to undertake if need

arises, but which brings him little pleasure and less glory--beyond the

consciousness that he has played his part as a man should.

The young man heard the recruiting sergeant to an end. And when that

worthy had finished he found fixed steadily upon him a pair of coldly

speculative gray-green eyes.

"How long have you been in the army?" he asked.