“Did they say what he had done?” I asked.
The clerk laughed. “It appears that he ran wild one night not long ago and wrecked a café or something—nothing serious.”
So Ben was on the way.
—3—
He arrived in the morning and was put to work immediately driving us around Tours. I think the General wanted to try him out before we started off on any journeys. Anyway, the result was that I didn’t have two minutes alone with the new arrival until evening, and I was dying to ask him for an explanation of his fall from grace. So as soon as we were out of earshot of any listeners, I put the question to him: “What the devil have you been up to, Big Boy? What’s the sad story about prison bars and fines?”
He gave me kind of a nasty look and said, “Don’t kid me, Leony. Don’t kid me.”
“What do you mean ‘kid you’?” I insisted. “It’s right on your record in plain writing!”
“Listen—” he ordered, with a wave of his hand, “is that any way to thank a guy fer savin’ yer life?”
“Whose life? When? Where? How?” I demanded, at a loss to divine what he was driving at.
“Say—don’t ya s’pose I know who I see? What I wanta know is why the frog was lammin’ hell outa ya. What the hell you been doin’ to his wife? I gave you credit fer better taste than that—but now I wouldn’t put nothin’ past ya!”