Page:Saxe Holm's Stories, Series Two.djvu/321

Rh sister had married and gone to Iowa to live; the other had died when Joe was a little boy, and Joe and his mother lived alone on the farm for many years. Mrs. Hale was a singularly strong, vigorous woman, but she was cut down in a single week by a sharp attack of pneumonia the very spring before the war broke out. This left Joe all alone in the world, and when he found the men in his town holding back from enlisting, and buying substitutes, he said, half sadly, half cheerily, "I 'm one of the men to go, that 's certain. There 's nobody needs me."

And now after one short year's fighting, he had come home a crippled man, to take up the old life alone. It was not a cheering outlook; and as he drew near the homestead, and saw again the grand stretches of old woods in which he had so often made his axe ring on the hickory trees, Joe thought to himself:— "I don't know what a one-armed man is good for, anyhow."

The cordiality with which his neighbors welcomed him back, the eager interest with which they all listened to his accounts of the battles he had been in, lessened this sense of loneliness for a short time. But the town was a small, thinly-settled one; in a few weeks everybody had heard all Joe had to tell; nobody said any longer, "Have you seen poor Joe Hale with his one arm?" The novelty had all worn off, the town went its way as