"I do that," returned Charlie. "I felt that I had been handed a mighty big job and was scared stiff for fear I wouldn't be able to make good at it."
"Exactly," returned John. "And I'll never forget how I felt when they stepped you up the first time and left me out. And when you had climbed on up and Captain Wheeler was killed and you received your commission, with me still stuck in the ranks—well—I never told you before but I'll say now that I was the lonesomest, grouchiest, sorest man in the whole A.E.F. It seemed to me about then that being a private was the meanest, lowest, most no-account job on earth, and I was darned near deserting and letting the Germans win the war and be hanged. I thought it would serve the Allies right if I was to let 'em get licked good and plenty just for failing to appreciate me."
Captain Charlie laughed.
"Oh, yes, you can laugh," said the new general manager of the Mill. "It's darned funny now, but I can tell you that there wasn't much humor in it for me then. We had lived too close together from that first moment when we found ourselves in the same company for me to feel comfortable as a common buck private, watchin' you strut around in the gentleman officer class, and not daring even to tell you to go to—"
"You poor old fool," said Charlie, affectionately. "You knew my promotion was all an accident."
"Exactly," returned John dryly. "We've settled all that a hundred times."
"And you ought to have known," continued Captain Charlie, warmly, "that my feeling toward you would have been no different if they had made me a general."
"Sure, I ought to have known," retorted John, with an air of triumph.
And then it appeared that John Ward had a very definite purpose in thus turning his comrade's mind to their army life in France. "And you should have sense enough to understand that my promotion in the Mill is not going to make any difference in our friendship. Your promotion was the result of an accident, Charlie, exactly as my position in the Mill to-day is the result of an accident. Your superior officer happened to see you. I happen to be the son of Adam Ward. If I should have known then that your rank would make no difference in your feeling toward me, you have got to understand now that my position can make no difference in my feeling toward you."
Charlie Martin's silence revealed how accurately John had guessed his
Mill comrade's hidden thoughts.