dissipated it. Please do not be in a hurry. Sit down and mourn with me
for a little while."

"Well, I'll sit down with you, sir, but I'll be hanged if I'll be
mournful. I'm too happy in the knowledge that I'm going home."

"Where is your home, sergeant?"

"In San Marcos County, in the southern part of the state. After two
years of Siberia and four days of this San Francisco fog, I'm fed up on
low temperatures, and, by the holy poker, I want to go home. It isn't
much of a home--just a quaint, old, crumbling adobe ruin, but it's home,
and it's mine. Yes, sir; I'm going home and sleep in the bed my
great-greatgrandfather was born in."

"If I had a bed that old, I'd fumigate it," the captain declared. Like
all regular army officers, he was a very devil of a fellow for
sanitation. "Do you worship your ancestors, Farrel?"

"Well, come to think of it, I have rather a reverence for 'the ashes of
my fathers and the temples of my gods.'"

"So have the Chinese. Among Americans, however, I thought all that sort
of thing was confined to the descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers."

"If I had an ancestor who had been a Pilgrim Father," Farrel declared,
"I'd locate his grave and build a garbage-incinerator on it."

"What's your grouch against the Pilgrim Fathers?"