“I really believe he loves me—in his way,” returned the girl thoughtfully. “Poor Uncle Jabez! Well, I am beginning to feel that it was meant that I should go home to him and to Aunt Alvirah.”
“Don’t!” he exclaimed. “You’ll make me wish to go home, too. And the way this war is now,” said Tom, smiling grimly, “they really need all us fellows. The British and the French have fought Fritz so long and at such odds that I almost believe they are half scared of him. But you can’t make our Buddies feel scared of a German. They have seen too many of them running delicatessen stores and saloons.
“Why, they have already sent some of their great shock troops against us in this sector. All the ‘shock’ they have given us you could put in your eye and still see from here to the Goddess of Liberty in New York Harbor!”
“That’s a bit of ‘swank,’ you know, Tom,” said Ruth slyly.
“Wait! You’ll see! Why, it’s got to be a habit for the French and the British to retreat a little when the Germans pour in on top of them. They think they lose fewer troops and get more of the Huns that way. But that isn’t the way we Yankees have been taught to fight. If we once get the Huns in the open we’ll start them on the run for the Rhine, and they won’t stop much short of there.”
“Oh, my dear boy, I hope so!” Ruth said. “But what will you be doing meanwhile? Getting into more and more danger?”
“Not a bit!”
“But you mean right now to take an air trip,” Ruth said hastily. “Oh, my dear! I don’t want to urge you not to; but do take care, if you go up with Ralph Stillinger. They say he is a most reckless flier.”
“That is why he’s never had a mishap. It’s the airmen who are unafraid who seem to pull through all the tight places. It is when they lose their dash that something is sure to happen to them.”
“We will hope,” said Ruth, smiling with trembling lips, “that Mr. Stillinger will lose none of his courage while you are up in the air with him.”