Hyde Park is cut through by the Illinois Central tracks. All that summer and autumn and winter Charley would start up in her sleep at the sound of high shrill voices like the voices of children. Lottie Payson heard them, too, at night in the old house on Prairie and could not sleep again. The Illinois Central and Michigan Central trains were bringing boys to the training camps, or from the training camps to the points of embarkation. They were boys from Illinois farms, Wisconsin towns, Minnesota and Michigan villages. "Yee-ow!" they yelled as their trains passed through the great sleeping city. "Whoo-ee! Yip!" Keeping their courage up. Yelling defiance at a world gone mad. All that summer you heard them, and through the autumn and winter, and the next spring and summer and autumn. High young voices they were, almost like the voices of children. "Berlin or Bust" was scrawled in chalk on the outside of their cars--scrawled by some raw youth from Two Rivers, Wisconsin, who was going to camp and to war in a baseball cap and his Sunday pants and a red sweater. Charley would pull the covers over her head and cover her ears with her hands until the last yip had died away. But Lottie would sit up in bed, her head thrown back, listening--listening as if they were calling to her. CHAPTER XIV One Saturday morning Lottie, just returned from marketing with her mother, answered the telephone and recognised with difficulty Beck Schaefer's voice, high-pitched and hysterical as it was. "Lot, is this you?" "Yes." "Lot--Lot--listen. Listen!" "I'm listening." "Lot, listen. You know I've always liked you better than any of the other girls, don't you? You're so sincere--so sincere and fair and everything. You know that, don't you, Lot?" "What's the matter," parried Lottie. "Oh, Lot darling, Sam Butler and I--Sam--you know--Sam and I, we're----" "Not!" "Yes! Oh, Lottie, isn't it wonderful! This afternoon. Don't breathe it. I'm scared to death. Will you be my bridesmaid? Lottie _dear_. Sam goes to Camp Funston to-morrow. He's got a captaincy you know. I'm going with him. We're to live in a shack with a tin roof and they say it's hotter than hell down there in the summer and, oh, Lottie, I'm so happy! We're to be married at the parsonage--Dr. Little. Mother doesn't know a thing about it. Neither does Sam's mother. Sam's going to tell his mother's companion after it's all over this afternoon, and then we'll go up there. I hate to think.... Mama said she wanted to go to California again this fall because it was going to be so uncomfortable here this winter, and Lottie, when she said that something in me just went kind of crazy.... Can you hear me? I don't want to talk any louder.... I called up Sam and began to cry and we met downtown and we decided to get married right away ... goodness knows I don't deserve ... and oh, Lottie, I feel so _religious_! You'll come, won't you? Won't you!" Lottie came.