Then two other new hands, two of these here demi-cowboys you have to put up with, had kept the bunk house noisy every night with a bitter personal quarrel including loud threats of mutual murder that never seemed to get any further.  So the flotsam, after drinking in some of their most venomous eloquence, had lined ’em up and commanded ’em to git busy and fight it out quick.  And he had then licked ’em both in a quick and exaggerated manner when they tried to keep on talking it out with him.

It was a sharply etched impression over the ranch, now shared by its owner, that this here invalid flotsam would take darned little nonsense from any one.  It was also the owner’s own private impression that he had been expelled from the war for rough behaviour on the field of battle and not because of wounds or sickness.  Most likely they’d told him the latter because they was afraid to tell him the truth.  But that was the real truth; he was too scrappy and wouldn’t let the war go on in peace and quiet.

Anyway, she and the Army was both satisfied, so let it go at that.  Mebbe after a few more arguments over there, when they’d made a convinced pro-Ally out of Germany, she might get some more shell-wracked jetsams like this one, that would step in without regard for the rules of civilized warfare and make the life of a certain beef-cattle raiser just one long dream of loveliness with pink rose leaves dreening down on her.  Mebbe so!

I was charmed indeed to hear the gladsome note from one so long dismal.  So I told the woman that the longest war must have its end and that by this time next year she would be refusing to hire good help at forty-five dollars a month and found, in place of the seventy-five she was now lavishing on indolent stragglers.

She said in that happy case she might consent to adorn the cattle business a few decades longer, but for her part she didn’t believe wars would end.  If it wasn’t this war it would be another one, because human beings are undeniably human.  As how?  Well, I could take it this way.  Say one of these here inventors sets up nights for twenty years inventing a gun that will shoot through a steel plate sixteen inches thick.  All right so far.  But the next day another inventor invents a piece of steel seventeen inches thick.  And it had to begin all over—­just a seesaw.  From where she set she couldn’t see no end to it.  Was she right; or wasn’t she?  Of course!

But now, further, about compelling little boys to wear long curls till maturity, with the idee of blunting their finer instincts and making hellions of ’em, so’s to have some dandy shock troops for the next war—­well, she didn’t know.  Room for argument there.