"In France."
"You mean soldiers?"
"Yes. I called up a friend of mine last night in Port Angeles. He used to be first lieutenant in my company. He's a reporter on The Times now. Hawkins told me a lot of the boys were out of work and he promised to look up a number of addresses of men in my old outfit. To-morrow I'm going to the city to round them up. They've stood by me before in many a tight place. It cost them a lot sometimes. But they stuck just the same. Now I've got a chance to stick by them. And I'm going to do it because I know they'll come up to the scratch."
The girl was impressed by the earnestness of his words. He meant well of course. It was a splendid idea but——
She voiced her objections. "You'll find business is a different game from war."
"Perhaps. But in both there is hard fighting. And when you are going into a scrap with all you've got, you want men behind you you can bank on."
"I wouldn't bank on them too strong. A lot of the ones I've seen think they're too good to work at an ordinary job. They have an idea the war has made them worth a lot more money than they really are. They like to tell what great things they've done. But when it comes to——"
"I've seen that kind, too. On both sides of the water. Over there no one depended on them. They were shunted from pillar to post until they hit a place
where they couldn't even hear the guns. When the war was over they came back. They were whole. And they talked."