“Yes, and made toast and tea on a little electric contrivance attached to the shining switchboard that controlled the dynamos,” supplemented the favored one who had dived to sea-nymph’s regions in a steel shell, internally so radiant, so charged with magical power that it might make Neptune himself feel outclassed. “I--I was a fish again when we came to the surface once more, broke water, and climbed up into the conning-tower, to look through the periscope’s eye! It seemed such a strange dream-world that I saw outside, not one bit familiar; either very clear and shining and remote, or with waves and boats--and trees along the shore--looming unnaturally large and frowning, according as the telescope was adjusted. Oh-h! I’m sure I was a nice little flounder or haddock then,” merrily, “taking a peep at the upper world.”
“You came near ‘floundering’ out--being shot out, rather--through the mouth of the conning-tower into the gray pulpit, or superstructure, where you might have preached a sermon to the fishes on power, if you hadn’t been killed; that was through--gracious!--through one tiny misstep on an automatic lever, like a sleeping tiger. The Junior Aide, who could control the beast, saved you just in time, eh?” prompted Sara, but abruptly swallowed her chaff as she caught her soldier-brother’s eye.
She knew he was envying that Junior Aide, the young naval ensign, with the gold cord drooping from his left shoulder, thinking that no girl as attractive as Olive--as game in an emergency, too--should have quite so many heroic cousins.
What chance, in her memory, could an ordinary peppery lieutenant in an infantry company have against them--a lieutenant who had let his rash temper betray him into prematurely “skinning” a sergeant?
“I guess I was the blighter myself to-day--or as much of a ‘blight’ as that poor ‘doughboy’ with the matches--for letting temper, headlong anger, gas me. That little flame of a sister of mine, Sara, and I, we have the same sort of ‘pull-the-pin-and-see-me-explode’ temper,” he murmured heavily later, this thought rankling, in the ear of the oldest girl, who had looked into dreamland through the rounded eye of a periscope, when her companions had withdrawn to another corner of the lofty balcony for a better view of the sunset.
“Oh! don’t talk of ‘blights!’” she gasped laughingly. “I’m afraid that ‘bothering bugs’ and plant mildew won’t be in it with me for--for a ‘hoodoo’ when it comes to our working steadily three hours a day, weather permitting, in that green oasis of a war-garden amid the sandy desert of the white dunes, when we’re camping out, the coming summer! And yet I--I was the first to volunteer when the president of the Clevedon County Farm Bureau addressed all the Camp Fires of our city a week ago, and called for recruits for just that very thing. If I don’t stick to my pledge the other girls won’t. And we know America has got to be the ‘world’s pantry.’ But, O dear! give me knitting, sewing, painting war-posters, posing, anything else, from morning till night, except weeding an’ hoeing when the sun’s hot and--and one’s back feels as crooked as--as one of those old French streets that the boys write home about!”
Blue Heron straightened her long, girlish spine with humorous apprehension. She was a tall girl, the white parting on the right side of her dark little head being on a level with the soldier’s cheek-bone, if they were both standing.
“Oh! you’ll carry on.” He smiled at her. “It’s a good line; hold it!”
“As you will when you repel an attack, or--or go over the top!... When d’you suppose you’ll be--starting--across?”
“No knowing! At any minute, perhaps! But--but, if you should be around here a week from to-day, you may see me, still on this side, undergoing gas initiation--getting my medicine down in the trenches at the hands of the Gas Defense Division, Chemical Warfare Service. Certainly those young chemists have a witch’s imagination in the horrors they put over on us!” The soldier laughed.