Page:Autobiography of an Androgyne 1918 book scan.djvu/144

114 The following morning I was sentenced to three days in the lock-up. As the village of my incarceration was only four miles from my home, and I was known at least by sight to some of its inhabitants, my father evidently soon learned of my disgrace, notwithstanding that I had sought to conceal my identity. Although he never mentioned the episode, he soon began to treat me regularly with extreme bitterness, as if he wished I had never been born. I was the only one of his children to whom he manifested any such spirit, notwithstanding I was the brightest of them.

Throughout an entire decade subsequent to this episode, I had an unreasonable nervousness about arrest and about policemen. Whenever any one whose name was unfamiliar was announced as waiting to see me, my first thought and fear were that a policeman had come to arrest me. Whenever any one called me up on the telephone, I always feared that it was in connection with my forthcoming arrest.

A few days after being restored to liberty, I informed my parents of my intention to go off on another trip afoot, this time for a couple of weeks. My secret object was to mingle with this detachment of troops, whom I knew to be encamped for some weeks about two days' easy journey on foot from my home. That just described was my first experience with soldiers, and I had become fascinated as never before. All my reveries were now to relinquish the career of a scholar and become a sutler near some fort in the wild west so that I could mingle daily with these demigods, whom I most abjectly worshipped.