But this did not mean that he accepted his lot without a struggle. The only discipline the present generation of Allstons knew was self-imposed. It is doubtful if one of them had ever received a direct order until Private Allston enlisted at Plattsburg. In the following few months the latter received enough to make up for a couple of generations--blunt, bullying orders that roused the fighting blood in him, until his intelligence came to his rescue. That was but the beginning. Doubtless this was good for him; certainly it was necessary. But now--well, it was good to be free. And if he had ceased to plot murder against certain superior officers, he was glad they were no longer about. It was good to be free. It was good to be able to take the right-hand road or the left as one chose. Or it was good to take neither and stop when one willed. It was good not to get up in the morning any sooner than one wished and to go to bed at night when one did wish. It was good to meet people without any uniform to tag them. It was good to hear them all speak English once again--even though they did it brutally. It was good to find some, too, who did it rather nicely. Like the young woman at Valley Elk. It was rather an odd and dramatic circumstance--his meeting with the young woman at Valley Elk. He had no intention of meeting her nor she of meeting him. Until it happened, both would have said that it was about the most remote probability of their respective lives. Wilmer Howe had come up here from New Orleans with her father to enjoy a quiet, cool, and serene summer in this bungalow Mr. Howe had built several years ago for just that purpose. Allston had not come up here for any purpose whatsoever except to try in passing a bass stream he had heard of in the preceding village--a whim scarcely deserving to be dignified as a purpose. It was mid-afternoon and he had been driving all day. Settled back in his seat, he was not as alert as he should have been so that, when rounding a turn he saw the frail figure of a girl in the middle of the road, he had no alternative to avoid hitting her but to swerve sharply to the right. The sudden jerk at the wheel snapped the steering-gear and drove him into the bushes against a chestnut-oak. He had not been going fast, but the impact knocked the breath out of him and the broken glass of the windshield cut his face. He pulled himself free, rather a sorry spectacle, but able to stand, and started towards the young woman in the road with the rather hazy intention of stopping her screams. “Look here,” he protested feebly and brokenly because it was not easy to talk. “Don’t make that noise. I’m the one to holler.” Roxie covered her eyes with her hands to shut out the sight of his blood-stained face. “Oh,” she moaned, “yer’re killed.” “I’m not,” he insisted. “But if you keep making that noise I’ll wish I had been.”