Sitting at his great carved table, once part of the fittings of a glorious old library and now a desk littered with official papers and maps, in the room of one of the greatest commanders in the world, the General finished the paper he was filling out with so much care, and lifted his eyes to the boy sitting so silently across the table. Then a smile lighted the General's tired eyes.
"Asleep!" he said. "Brave lad, he is worn out! Can't we manage to get him off to bed without waking him?"
He pointed to a room opening off the one they were in. "There is an extra cot in my room," said the General. "A couple of you take him in there." He beckoned his orderly. '"Get him undressed and cover him well. Let him sleep as long as he may."
So it came about that this was done; and in the General's own room, Porky, like the healthy boy that he was, slept and slept and slept. He did not dream of the past hard hours. He did not think of home, the pleasant house so far away where the dear father and mother, Mr. and Mrs. Potter, lived their busy, helpful lives, trying not to let each other know just how they longed for the two splendid boys they had given to their country. But like others who had given their all, each knew just how the other felt, and so tried by countless little unaccustomed acts of tenderness to help each other along. Nor did Porky dream of the other boys, or the famous swimming hole. There were no nightmares of school; no visions of Professor Wilcox bearing a sheaf of examination papers. Porky just slept and slept!
Night passed, breaking into such a wild and storm-tossed morning that it was scarcely light at all. There was a lull in the fighting that day and, except for the sound of distant guns booming at close intervals, the place was silent enough. The office work went on quietly. A couple of typewriters clacked busily. It might almost have been an office on Broadway. The General sat long at his desk, then mounted and rode off, accompanied by his orderlies.
Colonel Bright, after scribbling a note which he addressed to "the Potter boys" and left on the desk, also took his horse and went clattering away toward Paris.
Noon came. Still Porky slept, but at about two o'clock he was awakened by the most faithful of all the alarm clocks that a boy can have. He was hungry, he was frightfully hungry, and his eyes came open with a pop as he rose to his elbow and tried to place himself.
When he recognized his surroundings, he bounded to his feet in a moment, and after some prodigious stretching, hurried into his clothes, which he found nicely dried and on a stool by his cot. There was a table by the cot, and on it a good breakfast; cold, of course, but it was food, and there was plenty of it. What more can a fellow ask?
When he went out into the office expecting to find the group he had left the night before, there were only a couple of Captains, strangers to him, officers who had just been transferred. Porky, found the note from Colonel Bright.
It said simply: