From such a general order, Don saw clearly enough that he would be his own boss a great deal of the time, and that much of his most important work must be carried on according to his own judgment. The boy of sixteen, who had never really engaged in anything more strenuous than mere sport, except the arresting of the German spy back home, was now brought face to face with the duties and responsibilities that were fully man-size.
Don prepared himself quickly for any undertaking that might be before him. He made everything ready as the chief had suggested. He insisted also that the same be done by his helper, Billy Mearns, a city-bred young man who was just now getting familiar with handling and repairing a motor car.
Presently they started. The little truck, new, smooth-running and responsive, delighted the boy. His first duties as helper had been in a rattletrap machine, which ran only when it felt like it and in which they carried convalescents from the base hospitals to a place with terraced gardens and verandas two hundred miles farther south.
Don’s new duties exhilarated him and as he turned his car northward he could have said, with Macduff, when that warrior sought to meet Macbeth, the master war-maker: “That way the noise is. Tyrant show thy face!” for, boy-like, yet with a thorough understanding of the situation, secretly desirous of taking some part—he did not know what—in fighting, he had smuggled a sporting rifle into his car, and he carried a long-barreled revolver in a holster on his hip.
“You see,” he confided to Billy Mearns—they called each other by their first names almost from the moment of meeting—“we don’t know what we are up against, and I hope I may be hanged, drawn and quartered, as the old pirates used to say, if I let any blamed Hun sneak around me without trying to see if he is bullet-proof.”
“Right-o!” agreed Mearns. “But, for goodness’ sake, don’t get too anxious and take some of our Yanks for Heinies! If you do and I’m along, me for wading the Atlantic right back home! They’d do worse than draw and quarter us; mebbe they’d even pull out our hair or tweak our noses.”
“Pshaw! Anybody who couldn’t tell a Hun, day or night, ought to have—”
“His nose examined, eh? Oh, you sauerkraut and onions!”