Little Sister was a great comfort in those days. She gave him occupation and she gave him an income. He was never to forget his first sale. He had not found it easy to cry his wares. The Paines of King's Crest had never asked favors of the country-folk, or if they had, they had paid generously for what they had received. To go now among them saying, "I have something to sell," carried a sting. There had been nothing practical in Randy's education. He had no equipment with which to meet the sordid questions of bargain and sale. He had thought of this as he rode over the hills that morning to the house of a young farmer who had been suggested by the genial gentleman as a good prospect. He turned over in his mind the best method of approach. It was a queer thing, he pondered, to visualize himself as a salesman. He wondered how many of the other fellows who had come back looked at it as he did. They had dreamed such dreams of valor, their eyes had seen visions. To Randy when he had enlisted had come a singing sense that the days of chivalry were not dead. He had gone through the war with a laugh on his lips, but with a sense of the sacredness of the crusade in his heart. He had returned--still dreaming--to sell snub-nosed cars to the countryside! Why, just a year ago----! He remembered a black night of storm, when, hooded like a falcon--he had ridden without a light on his motorcycle, carrying dispatches from the Argonne, and even as he had ridden, he had felt that high sense of heroic endeavor. On the success of his mission depended other lives, the saving of nations--victory----! And now he, with a million others, was faced by the problem of the day's work. He wondered how the others looked at it--those gallant young knights in khaki who had followed the gleam. Were they, too, grasping at any job that would buy them bread and butter, pay their bills, keep them from living on the bounty of others? He felt that in some way the thing was all wrong. There should have been big things for these boys to do. There seemed something insensate in a civilization which would permit a man who wore medals of honor to sell ribbon over a counter, or weigh out beef at a butcher's. Yet he supposed that many of them were doing it. Indeed he knew that some of them were. The butcher's boy, who brought the meat over every morning to King's Crest, wore two decorations, and when Randy had stopped for breakfast supplies, the hero of Belleau Woods had cut off sausages as calmly as he had once bayonetted Huns. Randy wondered what the butcher's boy was feeling under that apparently stolid surface. Was his horizon bounded by beef and sausages, or did his soul expand with memories of the shoulder-to-shoulder march, the comradeship of the trenches, the laughter and songs? Did his pulses thrill with the thought of the big things he might yet do in these days of peace, or was he content to play safe and snip sausages?