There had never been anything extraordinary about Eddie
Houghton. He had had his faults and virtues, and good and bad
sides just like other boys of his age. He--oh, I am using too many
words, when one slang phrase will express it. Eddie had been just
a nice young kid. I think the worst thing he had ever said was
"Damn!" perhaps. If he had sworn, it was with clean oaths,
calculated to relieve the mind and feelings.
But the men that he shipped with during that year or more--I
am sure that he had never dreamed that such men were. He had never
stood on the curbing outside a recruiting office on South State
Street, in the old levee district, and watched that tragic panorama
move by--those nightmare faces, drink-marred, vice-scarred, ruined.
I know that he had never seen such faces in all his clean,
hard-working young boy's life, spent in our prosperous little
country town. I am certain that he had never heard such words as
came from the lips of his fellow seamen--great mouth-filling,
soul-searing words--words unclean, nauseating, unspeakable, and yet
spoken.
I don't say that Eddie Houghton had not taken his drink now
and then. There were certain dark rumors in our town to the effect
that favored ones who dropped into Kunz's more often than seemed
needful were privileged to have a thimbleful of something choice in
the prescription room, back of the partition at the rear of the
drug store.
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