Arline had the sheriff out at once for her darling, but Shelley got word and beat it farther. He finally got to Seattle, where he found various jobs, and kept his mother guessing for three years. He was afraid she'd make him start the curls again if he come home. But finally, when he was eighteen, he did come, on her solemn promise to behave. But he was no longer the angel-faced darling that had left, and he still expected at least one fight a day, though no longer wearing what would cause fights. He'd formed the habit and just couldn't leave off. A body could hardly look at him without starting something unpleasant. He was round like a barrel now, and tough and quick, and when anything did happen to be started he was the one that finished it. Also, he'd have his hair cut close every five or six days. He always looked like a prisoner that had started to let it grow about a week before he left the institution. Shelley was taking no chances, and he used to get a strange, glittering look in his eye when he regarded little Keats, his baby brother, who was now coming on with golden curls just as beautiful as Shelley's had ever been. But he done nothing sinister. In time he might of settled down and become a useful citizen, but right then the war broke out, so no more citizen stuff for Shelley. It was almost too good to be true that he could go to a country where fighting was legal; not only that, but they'd give him board and lodging and a little spending money for doing the only thing he'd ever learned to do well. It sure looked like heaven. So off he went to Canada and enlisted and got sent across and had three years of perfect bliss, getting changed over to our Army when we finally got unneutral so you could tell it. Of course his mother was almost more anguished about his going to war than about having his curls fixed with the sheep shears. She said even if he wasn't shot he would be sure to contract light habits in France, consisting of native wine and dancing, and so forth, and she hoped at least he could be a drummer boy or something safe. But Shelley never had a safe moment, I guess. No such thing as a quiet sector where he was. He fought at the Front, and then he'd fight at hospitals every time he got took back there for being shot up. He was almost too scrappy even for that war. He was usually too busy to write, but we got plenteous reports of his adventures from other men, these adventures always going hard with whatever Germans got in his way. And I bet his mother never dreamed that his being such a demon fighter was all due to her keeping him in curls so long, where he got the habit and come to love it for its own sake. Anyway, he fought and fought and had everything happen to him that German science had discovered was useful to exterminate the lesser races, and it finally begun to tell on him, hardened as he was by fighting from the cradle up, as you might say.