"And tell him that he should put on a hat," said Madame Pigou. "The sun is hot."
"Not so. Not to me. I like it. I play tennis in August bare-headed."
"The Americans stand the sun better than we," said Madame Pigou.
"But he is not an Indian. He is white," Helen explained. "American summers are hotter."
For Madame thought that most of the population of the States were Indians. Phil caught what she was saying.
"A white Indian, but not savage!" he called.
It had all been as good as play to young Jean, watching these grand people from the chateau reaping, until a distant sound on the road attracted his attention. It was the faint tramp of men and the rumble of guns. As the head of a column of infantry appeared past the screen of a stretch of woodland, he cried out, "Soldiers!" and ran.
The cry was taken up far and near over the fields. Most of the harvesters started toward the road and with them went Henriette and Helen and Phil. But not Madame Pigou. She stood watching the figures all of a pattern in their uniforms, moving like automatons sharp cut against the skyline, and then bent to her work. Her son could not be among these battalions. She knew that he was in Alsace. Buxom peasant girls and toothless old men and women standing by the roadside called out the joyful God-speed of their hearts to the soldiers of France.
The men in their red trousers and blue coats knew nothing of where they were going; and the gunners astride their horses and seated on the gun-carriages and caissons looked as if they did not care, if only action soon came. Still they kept coming, that myriad-legged, human caterpillar, its convolutions following the grade of the road in either direction to the horizon. It seemed a creature of irresistible man-power and still coming, when the cousins started back to their field.
"They are between us and the Germans, those brave fellows!" said Madame Pigou, her features in a transport of joy, with a long look toward the moving blue silhouettes sharpened now by the low sun. What more was there to say?