Dangerous Days

Clayton, glancing up from the visitor's slip in his hand, surprised

something wistful in the boy's eyes.

"Want to go, do you?"

"Give my neck to go--sir." He always added the "sir," when he remembered

it, with the air of throwing a sop to a convention he despised.

"You may yet, you know. This thing is going to last a while. Send him

in, Joey."

He had grown attached to this lad of the streets. He found in his

loyalty a thing he could not buy.

Jackson was his caller. Clayton, who had been rather more familiar with

his back in its gray livery than with any other aspect of him, found him

strange and impressive in khaki.

"I'm sorry I couldn't get here sooner, Mr. Spencer," he explained. "I've

been down on the border. Yuma. I just got a short leave, and came back

to see my family."

He stood very erect, a bronzed and military figure. Suddenly it seemed

strange to Clayton Spencer that this man before him had only a few

months before opened his automobile door for him, and stood waiting with

a rug to spread over his knees. He got up and shook hands.

"You look like a different man, Jackson."

"Well, at least I feel like a man."

"Sit down," he said. And again it occurred to him that never before had

he asked Jackson to sit down in his presence. It was wrong, somehow. The

whole class system was absurd. Maybe war would change that, too. It was

doing many queer things, already.

He had sent for Jackson, but he did not at once approach the reason.

He sat back, while Jackson talked of the border and Joey slipped in and

pretended to sharpen lead pencils.

Clayton's eyes wandered to the window. Outside in the yard were other

men, now employees of his, who would soon be in khaki. Out of every

group there in a short time some would be gone, and of those who would

go a certain number would never come back. That was what war was; one

day a group of men, laboring with their hands or their brains, that some

little home might live; that they might go back at evening to that home,

and there rest for the next day's toil. And the next, gone. Every man

out there in the yard was loved by some one. To a certain number of them

this day meant death, or wounding. It meant separation, and suffering,

and struggle.

And all over the country there were such groups.