“Twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of mats all spoiled, colors ran, didn’t set, no good.  This war is raising the devil with the United States textiles.  Maybe the Germans won’t get a glad hand when they come back.  We hear that they’re going to flood the market with good, low-priced dyes so as to bust up the new American plants.  Haven’t you heard them hollerin’ for tariff protection?  I’m going over to look up a new green dye the French are getting out.  We hear it’s pretty good stuff.  What are you boys doing, looking for contracts?”

The Iowan replied that he hoped to get into an English cavalry regiment, and I mentioned the corps I had joined.

“Well, don’t get killed,” exclaimed the dye-stuffs agent paternally, and settled down in his chair for a nap.

It was the third day out; the ocean was still the salty green color of the American waters, and big, oily, unrippled waves were rising and falling under the August sun.  From the rail I saw coming toward us over the edge of the earth, a small tramp steamer marked with two white blotches which, as the vessel neared, resolved themselves into painted reproductions of the Swedish flag.  Thus passed the Thorvald, carrying a mark of the war across the lonely seas.

“That’s a Swedish boat,” said a voice at my elbow.

“Yes,” I replied.

A boy about eighteen or nineteen, with a fine, clear complexion, a downy face, yellow hair, and blue eyes, was standing beside me.  There was something psychologically wrong with his face; it had that look in it which makes you want to see if you still have your purse.

“We see that flag pretty often out in Minnesota,” he continued.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Oscar Petersen,” he answered.

“Going over to enlist?” I hazarded.

“You bet,” he replied—­and an instant later—­“Are you?”

I told him of my intention.  Possibly because we were in for the same kind of experience he later became communicative.  He had run away from home at the age of fourteen, spent his sixteenth year in a reform school, and the rest of his time as a kind of gangster in Chicago.  I can’t imagine a more useless existence than the one he revealed.  At length he “got sick of the crowd and got the bug to go to war,” as he expressed it, and wrote to his people to tell them he was starting, but received no answer.  “My father was a Bible cuss,” he remarked cheerfully,—­“never got over my swiping the minister’s watch.”

A Chicago paper had printed his picture and a “story” about his going to enlist in the Foreign Legion—­“popular young man very well known in the—­th ward,” said the article.  He showed me, too, an extraordinary letter he had received via the newspaper, a letter written in pencil on the cheapest, shabbiest sheet of ruled note-paper, and enclosing five dollars.  “I hope you will try to avenge the Lusitania,” it said among other things.  The letter was signed by a woman.