Humorous stories; Washington (State) -- Fiction; Western stories
And she couldn't get him to protect himself from drafts by night.
He'd insist on having a window wide open, and when she'd sneak back to
close it so he wouldn't catch his death of cold he'd get up and court
destruction by hoisting it again. And once when she'd crept in and shut
it a second time he threw two shoes through the upper and lower parts so
it would always be open. He claimed he done this in his sleep, having got
into the habit in the trenches when he'd come in from a long march and
someone would close all the windows. But Arline said that this only
showed that war had made him a rowdy, even in his sleep--and out of the
gentlest-mannered boy that ever wore velvet garments and had a cinch on
every prize in the Sunday school; though she did not use coarse words
like that. She told me herself it was time we got this other side of what
war did to gently nurtured youths that had never soiled their lips with
an oath in their lives until they went into war's hell. She said just
that!
Also Shelley had contracted the vicious habit of smoking, which was all
a body would want to know about war. She said he'd have his breakfast in
bed, including whole slices of ham, which comes from the most loathsome
of all animals, and would then lie and smoke the Lord Byron five-cent
cigar, often burning holes in the covers, which he said was another old
trench habit--and that showed what war done to the untainted human soil.
Also while smoking in bed he would tell little Keats things no innocent
child should hear, about how fine it feels to deflate Germans with a good
bayonet. She had never esteemed Lord Byron as a poet, and these cigars,
she assures me, was perfectly dreadful in a refined home, where they
could be detected even in the basement.
Little Keats was now thirteen, with big joints and calf knees showing
under the velvet pants, and I guess his curls was all that persuaded his
mother to live, what with Shelley having gone to the bad and made a name
for himself like Bugs. But little Keats had fell for his brother, and
spent all the time he could with him listening to unpretty stories of
Germans that had been fixed up proper the way the good Lord meant 'em
to be.
After he'd been home a couple weeks or more Shelley begun to notice
little Keats more closely. He looked so much like Shelley had at that age
and had the same set-on manner in the house that Shelley got suspicious
he was leading the same double life he had once led himself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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