Summary
A lonesome post-office clings to a Blue Ridge spur like a postage stamp on an old valise; inside lives Sally Haston, ink in her veins and restlessness under her fingernails. She trades kisses with Steve Carey among laurel thickets yet barters them for a loftier currency—his uniform, his rifle, his voyage across the Atlantic crucible. Steve, half-smitten, half-shackled, is flung into a tarpaper city of raw recruits where Billy Murphy’s fists speak the only dialect he knows. Homesick insurrection brews; Steve slips away under a harvest moon, only to be escorted back by Sally herself—she who will not be left behind. Captain Roderick Brooke, a man carved from campaign maps and Walt Whitman, unspools the moral embroidery of the war, turning barrack walls into stained-glass sermons. But the mountains cough up another revenant: James Grogan, apple-brandy anarchist, who holes up in a smoke-black cabin, Sally his trembling collateral. A posse of fathers and farmers clangs up the holler; Steve, granted furlough, arrives first, fists and heart steeled, extracting Sally from gun-smoke and kerosene. In the final iris-shot he boards the transport ship, a silhouette against a pewter dawn, democracy his compass, Sally’s ribboned letters his ballast.
Synopsis
Postmaster's daughter Sally Haston, living in the Blue Ridge Mountains, loves Steve Carey but wants him to enlist and fight the Germans during the Great War. At the training camp, Steve is unhappy and frequently argues with his roughneck tentmate Billy Murphy. Steve deserts to visit Sally, who quickly accompanies him back to the camp, where Captain Roderick Brooke sympathetically explains the purpose of the war. Later, moonshiner James Grogan holes up with a gun to escape the draft and holds Sally prisoner. Her father organizes a posse, but Steve, on leave, rescues her and announces that he is leaving for Europe to fight for democracy.
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