The captain’s mustache lifted a couple of hairs more, Sergeant Jones in another part of the hall whispered to himself two words which I cannot repeat, and the Secretary looked about to see if there was a flag anywhere convenient for his popular climax about earnest faces and the stars in Old Glory. But there was no flag, and he therefore selected another of the many strings to his oratorical bow. He gave them his great “What I am for” speech, the speech which had brought the gallery down at Albany on Decoration Day, had caught the crowd at Terre Haute on the Fourth of July, swept Minneapolis on Labor Day and turned Dallas, Texas, hoarse on Washington’s Birthday. In it the Secretary asked, “What am I for?” and then answered the question. He was to watch over the enlisted man, he was to be his father and protect him from military tyranny. Superior officers were to cease their despotic methods. Was this not a republic where one man was as good as another? The very term “superior officer” was repugnant to the American idea, and no offender of any grade should hide behind it as long as he was Secretary of War. To hear him you would have supposed that until he stepped into the Cabinet the slave under the lash knew a better lot than the American soldier. To be sure, he did not always say these remarkable things in the same way. At Boston, for instance, he would draw it milder than at Billings, Montana. At Boston he mentioned other duties of the Secretary of War besides that of tucking the enlisted man in his bed every night; but he seldom spoke in Boston, because he preferred a warm, heart-to-heart audience. He knew at sight that he had one here. His practised eye ran the recruits over and read their wholesome vacant up-country faces, noted their big rosy wrists, appraised their untrained juicy agricultural shapelessness as they sat beneath him like rows of cantaloupes and watermelons. With such innocence as this, he knew that he could spread it thick; and very soon after the preliminary details about his always having cherished a peculiar affection for this part of the country, and how General Lee had had no warmer admirer than himself, he was spreading it unmistakably thick. By the time he had informed them that it was not colonels and generals to whom he bowed the knee, but the enlisted man, the so-called common soldier, whose bleeding feet had blazed the trail for liberty with fearless shouts of triumph, Sergeant Jones was muttering to his neighbor, “How long more d’yu figure he’ll slobber?” and the captain’s mustache was standing out from his face like a shelf.