A boy about eighteen or nineteen, with a fine, clear complexion, a downy
face, yellow hair, and blue eyes, was standing beside me. There was
something psychologically wrong with his face; it had that look in it
which makes you want to see if you still have your purse.

"We see that flag pretty often out in Minnesota," he continued.

"What's your name?" I asked.

"Oscar Petersen," he answered.

"Going over to enlist?" I hazarded.

"You bet," he replied--and an instant later--"Are you?"

I told him of my intention. Possibly because we were in for the same
kind of experience he later became communicative. He had run away from
home at the age of fourteen, spent his sixteenth year in a reform
school, and the rest of his time as a kind of gangster in Chicago. I
can't imagine a more useless existence than the one he revealed. At
length he "got sick of the crowd and got the bug to go to war," as he
expressed it, and wrote to his people to tell them he was starting, but
received no answer. "My father was a Bible cuss," he remarked
cheerfully,--"never got over my swiping the minister's watch."

A Chicago paper had printed his picture and a "story" about his going to
enlist in the Foreign Legion--"popular young man very well known in
the--th ward," said the article. He showed me, too, an extraordinary
letter he had received via the newspaper, a letter written in pencil on
the cheapest, shabbiest sheet of ruled note-paper, and enclosing five