“But what street is it on?”
“'Tain't on no strett, Boss.”
“What do you mean—no street?”
“Boss, wuz you ever in East Pittsburgh? Well suh, den does you 'member dat string of little houses dat stands in a row right 'longside de railroad tracks ez you comes into town f'um de fur side? 'Taint no street, it's jes' only houses. Well suh, I lives in de thirty-fo'th one.”
“I see. How did you get here?”
“Me? I rid, mostly.”
“Rode on what?”
“Rid part de time on a ship an' part de time on de steam-cyars but fust an' last I done a mighty heap of walkin', also.”
Further questioning elicited from Watterson Towers these salient facts: He had taken a job which carried him from East Pittsburgh to New York and left him stranded there. He had heard about the draft. He knew that sooner or later the draft would catch him and send him off to France where he would be expected to fight Germans, so he decided that before this could happen, he would visit France on his own hook, and as a civilian bystander, a private observer, so to speak, would view some of the operation of war at first-hand, with a view to deciding whether he cared enough for it as a sport, to take a hand in it voluntarily.
He had smuggled himself aboard a transport—Heaven alone knew how!—and fortified with a bag of ginger-snaps he had remained hidden away in a cargo-hold until the ship sailed. Two days out from land a new and very painful sickness overcame the stowaway and he made his way up on deck for air. There he had been caught and had been sent to the galley to work his passage across. When he had progressed thus far, his cross-examiner broke in. “What was the name of the ship?”