CHAPTER VIII

THE SECOND SECTION


Have you ever been picked up out of your three-meals-a-day life,
whirled around in a tornado of events, and landed in a situation
so grotesque and yet so horrible that you laugh even while you
are groaning, and straining at its hopelessness? McKnight says that
is hysteria, and that no man worthy of the name ever admits to it.

Also, as McKnight says, it sounds like a tank drama. Just as the
revolving saw is about to cut the hero into stove lengths, the
second villain blows up the sawmill. The hero goes up through the
roof and alights on the bank of a stream at the feet of his lady
love, who is making daisy chains.

Nevertheless, when I was safely home again, with Mrs. Klopton
brewing strange drinks that came in paper packets from the pharmacy,
and that smelled to heaven, I remember staggering to the door and
closing it, and then going back to bed and howling out the absurdity
and the madness of the whole thing. And while I laughed my very
soul was sick, for the girl was gone by that time, and I knew by all
the loyalty that answers between men for honor that I would have to
put her out of my mind.

And yet, all the night that followed, filled as it was with the
shrieking demons of pain, I saw her as I had seen her last, in the