Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories

								

elbow was not used to such treatment and it indignantly freed itself
before the pavement was reached. The first square was traveled in
embarrassed silence, then Miss Mink made a heroic effort to break the
ice:
"My name is Mink," she said, "Miss Libby Mink. I do dress-making over on
Sixth Street."
"I am Bowinski," volunteered her tall companion, "first name Alexis. I
am a machinist before I enlist in the army."
"I knew you were some sort of a Dago," said Miss Mink.
"But no, Madame, I am Russian. My home is in Kiev in Ukrania."
"Why on earth didn't you stay there?" Miss Mink asked from the depths of
her heart.
The soldier looked at her earnestly. "Because of the persecution," he
said. "My father he was in exile. His family was suspect. I come alone
to America when I am but fifteen."
"Well I guess you're sorry enough now that you came," Miss Mink said,
"Now that you've got drafted."
They had reached her gate by this time, but Bowinski paused before
entering: "Madame mistakes!" he said with dignity. "I was not drafted.
The day America enter the war, that day I give up my job I have held for
five years, and enlist. America is my country, she take me in when I
have nowhere to go. It is my proud moment when I fight for her!"
Then it was that Miss Mink took her first real look at him, and if it
was a longer look than she had ever before bestowed upon man, we must
put it down to the fact that he was well worth looking at, with his tall
square figure, and his serious dark face lit up at the present with a
somewhat indignant enthusiasm.
Miss Mink pushed open the gate and led the way into her narrow yard. She
usually entered the house by way of the side door which opened into the
dining room, which was also her bedroom by night, and her sewing room by
day. But this morning, after a moment's hesitation, she turned a key in
the rusty lock of the front door, and let a flood of sunshine dispel the
gloom of the room. The parlor had been furnished by Miss Mink's parents
some sixty years ago, and nothing had been changed. A customer had once
suggested that if the sofa was taken away from the window, and the table
put in its place, the room would be lighter. Miss Mink had regarded the
proposition as preposterous. One might as well have asked her to move
her nose around to the back of her head, or to exchange the positions of
her eyes and ears!
You have seen a drop of water caught in a crystal? Well, that was what
Miss Mink was like. She moved in the tiniest possible groove with her
home at one end and her church at the other. Is it any wonder that when
she beheld a strange young foreigner sitting stiffly on her parlor sofa,
and realized that she must entertain him for at least an hour, that
panic seized her?
"I better be seeing to dinner," she said hastily. "You can look at the
album till I get things dished up."
Private Bowinski, surnamed Alexis, sat with knees awkwardly hunched and