A sergeant
in rank, he sat at banquets as the guest of honor with the highest
officials of the Army and Navy and the Government on either side.
Wherever he went he heard the echo of the valuation which Marshal Foch
and General Pershing placed upon his deeds.
Many business propositions were made to him. Some were substantial and
others strange, the whimsical offerings of enthused admirers.
Among them were cool fortunes he could never earn at labor.
Taking as a basis the money he was paid for three months on the farm in
the summer before he went to France, he would have had to work fifty
years to earn the amount he was offered for a six-weeks' theatrical
engagement. For the rights to the story of his life a single newspaper
was willing to give him the equivalent of thirty-three years. He would
have to live to be over three hundred years of age to earn at the old
farm wage the sum motion picture companies offered, as a guarantee.
He turned all down, and went back to the little worried mother who was
waiting for him in a hut in the mountains, to the gazelle-like mountain
girl whose blue eyes had haunted the shades of night and the shadows of
trees, to the old seventy-five acre farm that clings to one of the
sloping sides of a sun-kissed valley in Tennessee. He refused to
capitalize his fame, his achievements that were crowded into a few
months in the army of his country.
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