“Yes. This is the best road—and that isn’t saying much,” the bespectacled driver declared.
“No! I mean so fa-a-ast!”
“Oh! Does it jar you? I’ll pull her down. Got so used to getting over all the ground I can before I break something—or a shell comes——”
He reduced speed until they could talk to each other. Ruth learned all in one gush, it seemed, that his name was Charlie Bragg, that he had been on furlough, and that they had given him a “new second-hand flivver” to take up to Clair and beyond, as his old machine had been quite worn out.
He claimed unsmilingly to be more than twenty-one, that he had left a Western college in the middle of his freshman year to come over to drive a Red Cross car, and that he was writing a book to be called “On the Battlefront with a Flivver,” in which his brother in New York already had a publisher interested.
“Gee!” said this boy-man, who simply amazed Ruth Fielding, “Bob’s ten years older than I am, and he’s married, and his wife makes him put on rubbers and take an umbrella if it rains when he starts for his office. And they used to call me ‘Bubby’ before I came over here.”
Ruth could appreciate that! She laughed and they became better friends.
CHAPTER XV—NEW WORK
The prefect of police at Lyse was quite right. Clair was within sound of the big guns. Indeed, Ruth became aware of their steady monotone long before the rattling car reached its destination.
As the first hour sped by and the muttering of the guns came nearer and nearer, the girl asked Charlie Bragg if there was danger of one of the projectiles, that she began faintly to hear explode individually, coming their way. Was not this road a perilous one?