“Maybe he’s a prisoner,” Tom suggested.
“Perhaps he had to come down in a wood somewhere,” Henry speculated, “and will get back to our lines.”
“The government makes mistakes sometimes,” Stannard said. “There was a woman in Upton—” He went on with a long story about a woman whose son was reported killed in France on the very day the boy had been in his mother’s house on furlough from a cantonment. There were a great many interesting and ingenious details to the story, but nobody paid much attention to them. “So you never can tell,” Stannard wound up.
“No, you never can tell,” Bruce agreed, but he didn’t look convinced. Something, he was quite sure, was wrong with Pete.
“Don’t anybody write Mother Jess,” he 247 said. “She and Laura have enough to worry about with Sid.”
“What if they see it in the papers?” Elliott asked.
“They’re busy. Ten to one they won’t see it, since it isn’t head-lined on the front page. Wait till we get the letter.”
“How soon do you suppose the letter will come?” Gertrude wished to know.
“‘Letter follows,’” Henry read from the yellow slip which the postman delivered from the telegraph office. “That means right away, I should say.”
“Maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t,” said Tom and then he had a story to tell. It didn’t take Tom long, for he was a boy of fewer words than Stannard.