“Yes! Hard luck. I wanted him badly with me. But he’s represented over here, Miss Ray, in the best way a man can be, short of actual personal service. I learned from him a method of overcoming traumatic shock which is more effective than any I’ve found in use here. It’s about our most difficult problem, you know. I scouted Burns’ theory in the beginning, but I’ve had a great chance to try it out over here, and it certainly does save some pretty desperate cases. If I can ever get a minute to write I’ll tell him a few things that will make him very happy.”
“I am so glad,” she said—and looked it.
“Now for my message. Back at Base I had a case that interested me mightily, not so much pathologically as psychologically. This boy Dyer was under my hands for a number of weeks—he’s back at the Front now—and a more naïve, engaging youngster from the back country I never knew. He had us all interested in him, he was so crazy to be under fire again. You had him here, I believe, on his way out.”
“Yes, Doctor. I shall always remember him.”
“And he, you, evidently. A number of weeks ago he heard me say that I intended to take this trip, and he figured it out that I might meet you. So he sent you this message, with instructions to me to deliver it somehow or answer to him.” He smiled over the recollection as he drew out a small paper. “Dyer could get away with more impudence—or what would be called that from anybody else—than any boy I ever saw. But it wasn’t really that—it was his beautiful faith that everybody was on his side, including the Almighty. He had an unshakeable and touching belief that God would see him through everything and permit him to render some big service before he was through. And since he hadn’t had his chance to do that yet, it followed as the night the day that he must get back to the Front and do it. I admit I came to feel much the same way about him myself. And when he gave me this message I understood that it must be delivered at any cost. So—without any cost at all—here it is.”
Jane received the folded paper with a curious sense of its importance, though it came from the most obscure young private in the A. E. F. With a word of apology she opened it, feeling that Doctor Leaver would like to know something of its contents, if they were communicable. After a moment during which she struggled with and conquered a big lump in her throat, she handed it to him. He read it with a moved face, and gave it back with the comment:
“That’s great—that’s simply great! Thank you for letting me see.”
The message was written in a cramped, boyishly uncertain hand, but there was nothing uncertain about the wording of it:
Miss Ray,
Dear Friend: