“What gets my goat,” he confessed, “is how we’re so blamed popular, Miss Alden. We Americans are well liked—awful well liked, ain’t we?”
“We certainly are,” Ruth agreed.
“We’re liked not just as well as the English, far as I can see, but better. Yes, better. That certainly gets my goat; out of it three years; in it, one; and not really in it all of one yet; and we’re—top hole. That’s a British expression, Miss Alden; means absolutely it.”
“Yes,” said Ruth; “I’ve heard it.”
“Well, we’re that; top hole. How does it happen? What’ve we done that others ain’t that makes them feel so about Americans over here?”
Ruth could not answer. She could only accept, at last, an invitation to lunch with him the first time they met again in any city where they had restaurants.
The perplexity which Sam Hilton felt was being shared by many and many another American in those days which swiftly were sweeping toward the end of the war; and not least among the perplexed was Gerry Hull.
That strange morning had arrived upon which battle was to be entered against the Germans, as usual, and to be continued until eleven o’clock; after eleven was to be truce. Gerry was on patrol that morning, flying a single-seater Spad in a formation which hovered high in the morning sky to protect the photographic machines and the fire-control airplanes which were going about their business as usual over the German lines, taking pictures of the ground, and, by wireless, guiding the fire of the American guns.
The American guns were going it, loud and fast, and the German guns were replying; they might halt at eleven, but no love was being lost upon this last day.
About the middle of the morning German combat planes appeared. Gerry was among the first to sight them and dash forward. Seven or eight American machines followed him; and for the swift seconds of the first attack they kept somewhat to formation. Then all line was lost in a diving, tumbling, looping, climbing, side-slipping maelstrom of machines fighting three miles above the ground. Each pilot selected a particular antagonist, and Gerry found himself circling out of the mêlée while he maneuvered for position with a new triplane Fokker, whose pilot appeared to have taken deep dislike for him.