“But this beats all the other things hollow, for a fact!” he declared after Bumpus had managed to give him the “gist” of recent events. “To think that you American scouts are right now carrying dispatches for the French army, and that the delivery of the same may mean a heap to the clinching of victory for Joffre! Say, there’s nothing neutral about that, let me tell you, Bumpus. Running a Red Cross ambulance, yes, and even helping ’em at a field hospital may be all right; but in tackling this you’re making us allies of the French. They could shoot you for doing it, if the Germans caught you.”
“Well,” replied the other, confidently, “they won’t catch us, all the same, I’m telling you, Giraffe. And Thad seemed to think it was all right. We’re not supposed to know what the message is we’re carrying. It may be a call for reinforcements over on the left; or that the army there has to fall back. No matter, Thad agreed to deliver it at Headquarters, and he will, barring accidents!”
Still Giraffe shook his head as if he did not wholly like the idea. As his ancestors had come from Germany many years before, and Giraffe was known to have more or less of a tender feeling for the cause of the Kaiser deep down in his heart, his feelings could be understood. This matter of strict neutrality is at best a most difficult thing to arrange, for in almost every case thinking people are drawn one way or the other.
“I don’t suppose now, Giraffe,” ventured Bumpus, a minute afterwards, with a vein of entreaty in his voice and manner, “that you happened to see anything of a lady in Paris who looked like my mother?”
Giraffe laughed scornfully.
“Why, Bumpus,” he hastened to say in a patronizing way, “you must know that Paris is something more than an overgrown village. Next to our own New York, and then London, it’s called one of the biggest cities in the world. Of course, right now the people have flocked out of the same burg, thinking Von Kluck meant to break through and gobble up the same; but still there were plenty of folks on the avenues, I noticed, tens of thousands, in fact. No, Bumpus, I’m sorry to say I didn’t chance to run across your mother.”
“Oh! well, I hope and expect she’s all right,” sighed the stout chum. “But there’s Allan pointing ahead. I wonder now if he’s discovered that side road we expect to strike along here, so as to get to where General Joffre is holding the fort?”
“So, that’s the game, is it?” exclaimed Giraffe. “Well, there is a road just where you see that clump of trees. I noticed it as we came along, because a scout is bound to use his eyes to the best advantage when he travels, either afoot or on the seat of an army Red Cross ambulance. Yes, and it leads toward the east in the bargain, Bumpus.”
“I’m glad to hear that, because once we get off this much traveled line we’ll be able to make better time,” the other observed.
Presently they made the turn. It immediately offered them a chance to speed faster, and this pleased Thad. He seemed to have taken a strange fancy for playing the part of the wounded dispatch bearer. Perhaps deep down in his mind he knew he really had no business to give that promise to the surgeon at the field hospital; but the conditions by which he was surrounded at the time must have made a deep impression on him; and once having given his word Thad could not back out. Right or wrong he was now grimly determined on carrying his mission to a successful termination.