"Considering what would have happened to me if I didn't have that sheathing outside the frame of my plane, I guess I ought to be grateful. Do you know only to-day I was figuring whether it paid for the extra weight, and had nearly made up my mind to have it ripped off. Nothing doing about that from this time on. Saved me a bad leg I tell you, boys."
Arriving at the Y. M. C. A. shelter the boys halted at the door. It was so cozy in there the boys could always find some good excuse for bending their footsteps in that direction; and also loitering after they had finished the business that took them to the hut. So no one was surprised, or disappointed, to hear Jack call out:
"I think I upset my glass of lemonade in my hurry to clear out; and as the thirst seems worse now than ever I reckon I'll have to indulge in another of the same kind, if Miss Sallie has the fixings. Will you join me, fellows?"
"Not me, for one, Jack," said Harry. "I got all of mine down without spilling a drop. I'm not so keen as you about lemonade. But I'll go along, because these rest places are the only homelike signs we run across on the front these days."
Jack thereupon gave Tom a sly nudge in the ribs.
"I was right, it seems," he managed to whisper aside. "Keep your eye on that blue-eyed Miss Sallie, and watch for any tell-tale signs in Harry's face when he's chatting with her. But she's a mighty nice girl, all the same, and I don't blame him. Comes of a fine family, too, I'm told."
Sallie, however, was only "conspicuous by her absence," as Jack put it. In fact she had retired to seek rest, for another day's arduous work came with the morning.
Tom, as did Jack, ordered another glass of lemonade, but drank only a small portion.
"Somehow or other I seem to have lost my taste for the stuff," he explained, when this fact was drawn to his attention by Jack; "or else this girl hasn't learned the wrinkle of mixing a drink as well as Miss Sallie has. But there's something bothering me, and I was just going to ask Harry if he didn't want to take a run over to the field hospital with me."
"What's that?" exclaimed the one mentioned. "You don't think any of those Boche bombs could have fallen there, do you, Tom?"