"No, it was more like—we must have put one on each other. It—it was fierce!"
"Happy days!" cheered the private. She lighted him with the effulgence of a knowing smile.
"Thanks a lot," she said.
The war went on.
In her next letter Winona Penniman wrote: "We moved up to a station nearer the front last Tuesday. I spent a night with Patricia Whipple. The child has come through it all wonderfully so far. A month ago she was down and out; now she can't get enough work to do. Says the war bores her stiff. She means to stick it through, but all her talk is of going home. By the way, she told me she had a little visit with Wilbur Cowan the other day. She says she never saw him looking better."
CHAPTER XIX
Two lines of helmeted men went over the crest of the hill. Private Cowan was no longer conscious of aching feet and leaden legs or of the burden that bowed his shoulders. There was a pounding in his ears, and in his mind a verse of Scripture that had lingered inexplicably there since their last billet at Comprey. His corporal, late a theological student, had read and expounded bits of the Bible to such as would listen. Forsaking beaten paths, he had one day explored Revelations. He had explained the giving unto seven angels of seven golden vials of the wrath of God, but later came upon a verse that gave him pause: