“Who is this ‘Pete’ you’re always talking about?” Elliott asked.
“Bruce’s older brother—I almost said ours.” The two girls were skimming currants, Laura with the swift skill of accustomed fingers, Elliott more slowly. “He is perfectly fine. I wish you could know him.”
“I gathered he was Bruce’s brother.”
“He’s not a bit like Bruce. Pete is short and dark and as quick as a flash. You’d know he would make a splendid aviator. There was a letter in the ‘Upton News’ last night from an Upton doctor who is over there, attached now to our boys’ camp; did you see it? He says Bob and Pete are ‘the acknowledged aces’ of their squadron. That shows we must have missed some of their letters. The last one from Bob was written just after he had finished his training.”
“This—Pete went from here?”
“He and Bob were in Tech together, 66 juniors. They enlisted in Boston, and they’ve kept pretty close tabs on each other ever since. They had their training over here in the same camps. In France, Pete got into spirals first, ‘by a fluke,’ as he put it; Bob was unlucky with his landings. But, some way or other, Bob seems to have beaten him to the actual fighting. Now they’re in it together.” And Laura smiled and then sighed, and the nimble fingers stopped work for a minute, only to speed faster than ever.
“I haven’t read you any of their letters, have I? Or Sid’s either? (Sidney is my twin, you know. He is at Devens.) But I will. If anything, Pete’s are funnier than Bob’s. Both the boys have an eye to the jolly side of things. Sometimes you wouldn’t think there was anything to flying but a huge lark, by the way they write. But there was one letter of Pete’s (it was to Mother), written from their first training-camp in France after 67 one of the boys’ best friends had been killed. Pete was evidently feeling sober, but oh, so different from the way any one would have felt about such a thing before the war began! There was plenty of fun in the letter, too, but toward the end, Pete told about this Jim Stone’s death, and he said: ‘It has made us all pretty serious, but nobody’s blue. Jim was a splendid fellow, and a chap can’t think he has stopped as quick as all that. Mother Jess, do you remember my talking to you one Sunday after church, freshman vacation, about the things I didn’t believe in? Why didn’t you tell me I was a fool? You knew it then, and I know it now.’ That’s Pete all over. It made Mother and me very happy.”
Elliott felt rather ashamed to continue her probing. “Have they always lived with you,” she asked, “the Fearings?”
“Oh, yes, ever since I can remember. Isn’t Bruce splendid? I don’t know how 68 we could have got on at all this summer without Bruce.”