Well, Grandfather, he talked on that way all through the meal until I was nearly worn out with it, and I suppose I have worn you out too, but I haven’t told you half. However, I have written a long letter and Mother will be wondering why I don’t take her to dinner.
Washington, DC, June 24.
Dear Grandfather:
Well, Grandfather, I thought I was going to turn up something big yesterday, but it was a false scent; at least, so I was told this morning at the Department. However, I am grateful to Tracy, my newspaper acquaintance, for giving me the tip, and it’s a good thing to stand well with a man like him because he gets around and sees everybody and everything and may some day give me a clue that will amount to something.
He called me up yesterday forenoon just after I had reported at the Department and had returned to the hotel to take Mother for a drive. He said if I would meet him at a certain place on the Avenue, he thought he could put me on the trail of a big conspiracy. So I asked him if it had to be right away, as I had promised to take Mother driving, and he said he thought it would be very dangerous to delay even for two or three hours. So I apologized to Mother and went down to meet him.
When I met him, he said we mustn’t be seen talking together in such a prominent place because no one knew who was watching us; so we went into a drugstore where there was only one customer, a girl, and the clerk, and he told me he had just heard that on Florida Avenue, at a certain address, there was a shoe-shining parlor of which the proprietor was a German, whereas almost all the other bootblacks in town were either black or tan, and that was suspicious in itself; but furthermore several young men who had patronized him had been afflicted almost immediately afterwards with falling arches, and it was believed he was using polish of such chemical composition that it would penetrate the leather and cause this condition of the feet, the object of course being to decrease the man power eligible for the draft by rendering them physically deficient.
He gave me the address, and I returned to the hotel and got Mother, for I thought she might as well go along in the taxi for the drive, and of course I would leave her and the machine far enough from the shine-stand to be perfectly safe in case of an outbreak of any kind. But the neighborhood to which we had to go looked so disreputable that I was afraid to leave her—so I told the driver to take her back to the hotel and I would return on the streetcar when my work was done.
Well, there was no shine-parlor at the address Tracy had given me—nothing, in fact, but a vacant lot. So I returned to the hotel and called up Tracy, who said he must have had the wrong address, but anyway he was sure the tip was good and if he were I, he would look around town a little and try to find the shine-stand that was not conducted by negroes. But I had an engagement in the afternoon, and of course it was folly to try to do anything about it last night, and there was a dance to which I had accepted an invitation. So I merely wrote down the data I had and gave it to one of the men at the Department this morning.
I heard a bit of rather sad news at the dance. Miss Stark, the girl of whom I believe I once wrote you, was not there, and it seems that her fiancé, who had been in France a year, was so badly wounded last week that he has been honorably discharged as unfit for further service and will be sent back here as soon as he is able to make the trip. It is tough on a young fellow to get it like that, and of course she felt so bad over the news that she would not come to the dance, and as a result I had a rather tedious evening of it. However, I called her up this forenoon and did what I could to cheer her, and tomorrow I am to take her for a drive unless there is some special assignment for me at headquarters.
Washington, DC, July 1.
Dear Grandfather:
Well, Grandfather, I just had the pleasure of meeting Gen. Rowan, one of the biggest men in the country today, but of course there is no need of my telling you who he is. Capt. Bellows introduced me to him, and he asked us both to sit down at his table and visit a moment. He inquired what branch I was in, and I told him, and he seemed very much interested in me and asked whether I was all right physically. I told him I certainly was, though sometimes I felt awfully tired and nervous in the morning. Then he said to Bellows:
“Why is it some of you boys don’t try to get to France?”
Bellows said he supposed it was because most of us had been there with our parents several years ago, so it would be no novelty, and others of us preferred waiting until long enough after the war so that the country would be rebuilt to look something like
